rocket men (and women, too)
by theatrhythms
Summary: A boy with ocean eyes. An android. Three idiosyncratic roommates. A girl made of caramel. A lemon-bearing Scot. Starfleet University. Orion Peaks. Albany, Riverside, New York. Oh, and some silly blathering about the stars. ( also known as that one au where jim kirk goes to starfleet university: a prestigious college in albany, new york / kirkspock / please read author notes )


**AN:** so, uh. i've been sitting on this baby for awhile now, and now that i'm actually getting around to posting it, i'm not entirely sure what to say. i kind of feel like it's a mess right now, to be honest. this is my first stab at star trek fic, and i haven't really read a whole lot of other stories in this fandom (i don't know if that has any effect on how this story reads, but i thought it was worth mentioning).

just a heads-up: i plan on posting this in either three or four very large parts. this first part took me about four weeks(?) to finish, so - if i can manage it, what with the school year starting soon - hopefully there'll be a month or less between updates.

**some things to consider:**  
- there are ableist slurs used in a derogatory fashion and a racial slur used teasingly.  
- i've tweaked chekov's accent and tried to write it in a way that reads more like an actual russian accent instead of the polish-esque accent they gave him in both TOS and the reboot.  
- also, i hope the way i write chekov and scotty's accents doesn't come off as offensive. i researched the characteristics of both russian and scottish accents as i wrote, so their dialogue in the story is based off of that information. mccoy's southern accent also wasn't intended to be offensive or stereotypical or anything – i myself come from the south and i based his speech off of the way most people talk where i live.  
- i know john cho is korean, but i'm pretty sure sulu was originally intended to be japanese, so. my sulu is a japanese sulu.  
- there are and will be extended references to other works of fiction that might be confusing to people who are unfamiliar with their plots, but i don't think it's a big deal that you should go out and a bunch of research or whatever to understand them.  
- this is only the first of three or four parts, so please please please, i encourage you to not be deterred by my initial characterization of jim. i've seen a lot of criticism of some of the traits a lot of fans disagree over whether he does or doesn't possess, and i understand that in this part alone, he might come off as more negative than most other depictions of him are. all i'm going to say on the matter is this: people are as much their mistakes and shortcomings as they are their strengths and achievements, and in the context of this story and this part, jim is still wet behind the ears. cut him a little slack.  
- if you're not comfortable with metafiction/the narrator addressing the audience, you might not like this all that much.

this story, in its entirety, is for **lenore**, who has been the absolute greatest, most hilarious and supportive and all-around awesome friend i could ask for this summer. also for my dear, amazingly sweet **priya**.

* * *

**i.**

(even though immortals) they have vices, too

* * *

**Friday, August 2****nd****, 2013.  
**James Tiberius Kirk, known by most as simply "Jim", crosses **five** state lines over the course of **one**-**thousand and twenty**-**three** **miles** in his stepfather's old pickup truck on his way from Riverside, Iowa to Albany, New York. He does not sleep for the entirety of the trip – a good **sixteen hours and twenty-three minutes**, to be exact – and he is only accompanied by the sweet sounds of Joy Division and Nirvana streaming from speakers that are easily over **thirty years-old **and the **half-gallon** mug of black coffee he will refill every time he stops to gas up.

Some things to remember about Jim Kirk:

- The longest period of time he has ever gone without sleep is **forty hours and eighteen minutes**.

- He could probably be considered sleep-deprived about **82%** of the time.

- He may or may not have a case of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

- There is a **97%** chance that he is not ready for college (or adulthood, for that matter).

In the passenger seat beside him is a crumpled leather jacket and a somewhat tattered backpack, **the contents of which include:**

- A wad of **three** hundred dollar bills, **four** fifties, **four** twenties, **five** tens, **ten** fives, and **twenty-one** ones (**seven-hundred and one** dollars in total).

- His laptop (and its charger).

- His cellphone (and the charger for that, too).

- An unopened package of **thirty** ballpoint pens, and another of **five** black Sharpies.

- Two **three-hundred and sixty** page college-ruled notebooks.

- A copy of _Slaughterhouse-Five_, a copy of _1984_, and a copy of _The Catcher in the Rye_.

- His driver's license.

- His course schedule, folded **twice**.

**- Five** copies of his mostly sparse résumé.

**- Half **a pack of cigarettes and a Zippo lighter.

**- Two** toothbrushes, **one** tube of toothpaste, **one **can of shaving cream, **two** razors, **one** stick of deodorant, **one** bottle of Advil, and **one** hairbrush.

In the bed of his truck sits:

**- Two** suitcases of clothing.

**- Four** crates of personal belongings, most of which consist of things like bedsheets and band posters and flashlights and an alarm clock.

**- One** mini-fridge.

Every **two hours** or so, he will fish another cigarette and his Zippo out of his backpack or change the CD currently playing out for another. Every **sixty minutes**, he will remind himself that he wanted this, that he voluntarily chose to do this, that this is the only way he won't end up stuck in Riverside for much of the foreseeable future with nowhere to go and a hypothetical alcohol addiction. Every **twenty-five minutes**, he will panic and fool himself into thinking just the opposite.

* * *

Jim Kirk was **six years-old** when he decided he wanted to become a police officer. Sam told him one morning over his bowl of Cheerios that their father was one, that he saved a lot of lives doing what he did. And Jim found that really liked the sound of that whenever it would come fumbling out of his mouth – '_saving lives_'.

Jim was **ten years-old** when he got sick of everyone comparing him to His Father, the Life-Saver. The eyes, bluer than the depths of any ocean (as if Iowans have ever seen the ocean anywhere but through their television screens). The mouth, perpetually open and bleeding on the inside from the sharpness of the tongue that it holds and rarely, if ever, soundless. The attitude, headstrong and confident and passionate and almost as if made via carbon copying, give or take a little of that arrogance and volatility. But it's mostly the eyes that make him his father's little duplicate, especially when his mother is scolding him and she accidentally calls him '_George_' (and Jim knows that the slip of the tongue has nothing to do with his older brother, who has always been just '_Sam_').

Jim was **eleven** when he stopped wanting to become a police officer.

Jim was **fourteen** when he snuck into the local planetarium in a scarcely thought-out attempt to hide from Sam and his stepfather. He spent nearly **three hours **watching the artificial night sky play out before him, naming the planets and following the stars with his ocean eyes over and over and over again. Never in his life had he ever felt more at peace. Never in his life had he wanted to go home less (and he'd already begun to think of his home as one of the many unknown circles of hell, right alongside his school and Riverside itself).

And that was the day his homework started getting turned in, his C's began to transform into A's, and Jim Kirk's heart became set on becoming an astronaut.

(Saving lives in this day and age is overrated anyway.)

* * *

**Saturday, August 3****rd****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk moves into the Alpha Dormitory after checking in and snagging his student ID from the lobby of the ever prestigious Starfleet University. On his way to his dorm, he thoughtlessly collides front-first with a young woman with caramel skin, pixie hair, and eyes like embers. He spills a bit of his coffee on her pristine shirt in the process.

"_Shit_, I'm sorry –"

A flash of her sharp, burning eyes. "Be a little more careful next time and you won't have to be."

And in that moment, Jim thinks he's in love.

He reminds himself then that he's not some clueless fifteen year-old and lets the subtlest of smiles grace his face, his eyes wander very briefly to the fresh stain on the breast of her shirt, and his right eyebrow quirk upwards just the slightest bit, and he says, "I'm sorry, I don't think I caught your name there?"

"Yeah, probably because I didn't pitch it in the first place," she says. She's walking away before Jim can scrape his jaw (and a little bit of his heart, not that he would ever admit it) off of the pavement, but somehow, that's okay when he gets to watch her leave with her crisp button-down hugging her shoulders and her high-waisted skirt accentuating her every curve and her mile-long legs carry her away, and that's when he subconsciously decides that he is going to have her one way or another by the time the week is up.

(We're holding him to that, you and I.)

"You sure you don't need help with that stain?" is what he calls after her. She doesn't answer him, but the line of her shoulders straightens just enough for him to see.

She'll fall in love with him yet.

Then there is Jim unloading his truck and getting all of his shit (which isn't much, to be honest) into his assigned dorm room – **third floor**, **fourth** to the right, just his fucking luck – and when he first walks in, he takes a moment to appreciate the surprisingly spacious living room/kitchen combination, the carpeted floor, the wooden coffee table, the **36-inch** LCD television. It's really nice, for a standard-issue apartment. He is, for once in all his **eighteen years**, the first one to arrive.

There are **two** bedrooms fitted for **two** occupants each – **two** beds and **two** nightstands with **one** desk, **one** dresser, and a closet per room – and **one** bathroom adjoining to both simultaneously (a very economical layout). Jim takes all of **thirty seconds** to claim the bed on the right in the room on the right (mostly because he likes the color of the paint on the walls in there better), and in **three** trips to and from his truck, he has everything but his mini-fridge stacked in his own little corner.

At the end of his **fourth** trip, he nearly drops the damn appliance on his foot in surprise, no thanks to the guy (presumably one of his new roommates) popping out of the bathroom not **three seconds** after he's in the apartment, and before you have yourself a good chuckle over that (which I encourage you do), please consider how much sleep and coffee Jim has had over the course of the past **eighteen hours** or so (absolutely _none_ and about **five gallons** – roughly **7600 miligrams** – respectively).

"Hello?" the guy says when he jams his head through the doorway, and his voice is loud, rough, tainted with a thick Southern drawl Jim has never heard anyone in real life speak with before now, and to be honest, that's what startles him more than anything else – just the sheer volume and the timbre of the man's _voice_.

Before he can answer or do anything but try to prevent his imminent death via heart attack, the man's eyes land on him and he asks him, "You're the one with all your stuff in the room, aren't you?"

And from there to the room and on, it's just this _guy_ asking him questions without giving him time to answer and making comments (critiques) about the campus and the dormitory and the state of the _bathroom_ ("Lord knows if they've even cleaned it since before the summer – you can never be too thorough, you feel me?") while Jim digs his bedsheets and quilt out of one of his crates and busies himself with dressing his mattress while his new roommate continues to soapbox and ramble, and Jim doesn't really know if he's relieved by it (in the sense that _wow_, he actually met someone without managing to piss them off in the first **five minutes** of knowing them, and he didn't have to _try_, didn't have to do anything _at all_) or just the slightest bit annoyed, but that doesn't really matter when he's sitting on the edge of his bed and he feels as though he's just lived through a war and his eyelids are so heavy with exhaustion that the mere _thought_ of keeping them open any longer is too much for him – he might actually cry about it.

A hand on his shoulder and Roommate Guy is asking, "You okay, man?"

Jim decides that he likes how remarkably comfortable the guy is with him. It's a first for him.

"When's the last time you got any sleep?" Roommate Guy adds when Jim peers up at him, his eyes most likely just as bloodshot and strained (which reminds him that he probably looked like microwaved shit when he spilled his coffee on that caramel goddess earlier, god_dammit_).

"Eighteen-ish hours ago?" is his answer. The responding look on his roommate's face is downright comical in its horror.

"Dammit, man!" the guy exclaims, surprising Jim once again (but thankfully not enough to have his heart threatening to give out on him). He gives his shoulder a good shake, says, "As a doctor in the making, I order you to get some sleep – _stat_."

Jim doesn't need any more encouragement to shuffle his kicks off and worm his way beneath his comforter, and even though it might seem like he's blindly following the orders of a man he just barely knows, he's simply too bone-tired and senselessly comforted by the guy's unusually abrasive presence to do otherwise. On his way under, he says something like, "You're gonna be an old sawbones, huh?", because he's drunk with fatigue and he's lost control of his life, or something.

(I would like to take this moment to draw your attention to the fact that it is almost **9:30** in the morning and Jim Kirk is about to spend his first day at Starfleet University sleeping like a log. He traveled over a thousand miles to lie down and take a nap. What a life this guy has.)

"You bet yer ass," Roommate Guy replies. Jim can't see him when he pats his leg through his quilt and moves across the room to start unpacking his own things, when he asks, "You been drinkin' coffee outta this thing all night?"

Assuming that he's referring to the mostly-empty mug sitting on the dresser, Jim makes a grunting noise that kind of passes for a '_yes_'.

Roommate Guy lets out a loud, extraordinarily audible sigh. "You're lucky you found me when you did, kiddo," he comments, nearly grumbling.

Jim can tell right then and there that they're going to have a very special relationship, and then he's lost to the crumbling black abyss of sleep.

* * *

**About three months ago.**

Jim Kirk rolls into bed with a bag of Hot Cheetos from down the street and his laptop and opens up his Gmail with a whopping total of three keystrokes. He finds **eight** emails waiting for him:

**- One** is a notification from Spotify.

**- Two** are from pornography websites.

**- One** is from Facebook, reminding him about **two** of his 'friend's upcoming birthdays.

**- Two** are spam emails.

**- One** is from Starfleet University.

**- One** is from a 'Hikaru Sulu'.

Jim makes quick work of deleting all of them save for the last two, which he reads with varying degrees of interest.

The email from Starfleet informs him that he has been assigned to Apartment A28 in the Alpha Dormitory on Starfleet campus and that he will be rooming with **two** freshmen and **one** sophomore, whose contact information they have gracefully provided him with.

**- Chekov**, Pavel | **Email: **rachmanisaur

**- McCoy**, Leonard | **Email: **leohmccoy

**- Sulu**, Hikaru | **Email:** suluhikaru

The email then goes on to say that he is due on campus on **August 4****th****, 2013**. Apparently Starfleet is lucky to have him, or whatever. Jim makes a mental note to print the message out sometime later today.

He then moves on to the email from Hikaru Sulu, his soon-to-be roommate.

_James._

Jim snorts a laugh. (Who the fuck calls him _James_ anymore?)

_After receiving my email from Starfleet University (which I am sure you received as well), I took it upon myself to contact you as soon as possible, being that we will be living together in three months. It would be nice to get to know you a bit before we're crammed in the same apartment, and so I would greatly appreciate it if you would respond to this email telling me a little about yourself (no pressure, though). As for me?_

_I'm open to discussing a chores schedule._

There Jim has to actually _laugh_ out loud, because honestly, the last thing he was thinking about when it came to college was the fucking _chores_ he'd have to be doing (which he inevitably _wouldn't_ be, what with all the parties he'd be going to and the ladies he'd be courting).

_I can promise you I will beat your ass at any multiplayer game you might run me by._

Jim's obnoxious snickering turns into an amused chuckle, then.

_I have many hobbies, so rest assured that you won't find a boring roommate in me._

_And you can just call me Sulu._

The ignorant white man in Jim heaves a heavy sigh of relief at the prospect of never having to struggle to pronounce a name like '_Hikaru_'. It occurs to his more sensitive side that this such reaction is probably the reason why Mr. Sulu has resorted to going by his last name only in the first place.

_I hope to hear from you soon, James. I'm sure I would be glad to have you for a roommate._

_Sulu._

Jim tells himself he's going to write the guy back as soon as he finishes his bag of Cheetos and his bottle of Sprite, but over **half an hour** later he's entrenched deep in the bowels of and he still hasn't even begun to pick out what few not-awful personality traits he may or may not have to tell Sulu about.

* * *

**Saturday, August 3****rd****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk wakes to find that the bedroom is significantly dimmer than it was earlier, and when he musters up the strength to sort-of roll out of bed and dig his cellphone out of his backpack, he learns that it is **6:29** in the evening. He slept for **nine** **hours** – a good** five hours** less than his more devastating usual **fourteen hours**.

A distant, laughing '_oh my god_' from the living room reminds him that _oh yeah_, he's definitely _not_ the only person who exists in the world, and he is currently sitting on the floor in a dorm room on the campus of Starfleet University, and he is enrolled in Starfleet University, and he is in college, _yes_ – as of now, he is an adult and he is in college.

Jim then proceeds to puke all of his internal organs onto the carpet.

Then there's him remembering that he hasn't changed his clothes since yesterday and he actually kind of smells a little and he more than likely has three roommates (one of which actually _put him to bed_ **nine hours** ago, holy _fuck_) in the living room waiting to laugh at him and his utter patheticness, and it would honestly be the shittiest move ever if he tried to go take a quick shower without being noticed, but like I said, he smells kind of funny and he's probably already made one of the worst impressions possible on the people he's going to be living with for the next ten months by _conking the fuck out_ first chance he got and not returning their emails and generally being the child he is, and shit, there he goes, he's lying on the floor and he kind of hates himself and he's wondering for what has to be the **six-thousandth** time whether or not he actually belongs here, in College City, a subsidiary of Adultville.

After about **five minutes** of that useless behavior, Jim takes it upon himself to get up and at least change his clothes – a dark tank top instead of the grungy Black Sabbath t-shirt he had on, a pair of gym shorts in exchange for his holey jeans. It doesn't occur to him how douchey such a getup might be until his hand is on the doorknob and he isn't stopping himself from going into the living room, which is... _empty_.

There is a laugh from the kitchen (which is only separated from the living room by a short dividing wall that looks like it comes up to just past Jim's hip), though.

"Oh– is that Sleeping Beauty?" a disembodied voice says, interrupting the laughter, and it's not the doctor-to-be from earlier; this guy has a considerably softer, evener voice with no discernible accent, no consonant-dropping, nothing but practiced enunciation and something like a stone of intent and authenticity weighing it down in Jim's eardrums. Jim likes the sound of it instantly.

When Jim steps out from behind the projection in the wall hiding him from view, he becomes the focus of three sets of eyes, most prominently the one belonging to the medical student from earlier, who does this thing where he kind of cocks the glass in his hand at him and goes, "Oh, yeah. That's him."

A decidedly Asian young man (who is more than likely the 'Hikaru Sulu' Jim got an email from several months ago) smiles an oddly welcoming smile (and I only say '_oddly_' because Jim has almost never in his life been _welcomed_ by anyone) and says, in his warm baritone voice, "Welcome to the land of the living. You must be James."

A more than familiar smirk takes up residence on Jim's face, then, tugging the left corner of his mouth up and putting the sun in his ocean eyes. It's not entirely real yet (he doesn't know these people well enough for it to be), but it will be very, _very_ soon.

"Call me Jim," he tells them when he's shaking their hands and the Asian guy is passing him a glass of _wow_, rum and coke (drinking on his first day at university, _awesome_), and even though it's a little uncomfortable and almost _terrifying_ that he's standing in this brand new kitchen with these brand new people he's going to be living with in this brand new apartment in this brand new place from now on, the alcohol and the warmth of their palms makes it exponentially less so.

Jim discovers that medical student's name is **Leonard McCoy** and that he is the sole sophomore (and therefore the one most likely to become the mama bear in this ensemble) in the household. He was born and raised (and I want you to imagine him saying that in his ridiculous Southern accent, because Jim just barely resists bursting into laughter when he does) in Athens, Georgia, he has **five** (_five_) older sisters, he hasn't spent a moment of his life _not_ being angry about _something_ since his sixth birthday (which was, according to him, the day the Lord forsake him and his name everafter), and the things he enjoys most in this world include whiskey shots, Bob Dylan, a good rant every now and then, and the satisfaction of helping another human being. He is dubbed '**Bones**' in no time, courtesy of Jim's rapidly decreasing sobriety and the absurdly dated epithet he used on him earlier.

Much to Jim's utter and total lack of surprise, the Asian guy _does_ turn out to be **Hikaru Sulu**, who is double-majoring in physical science and biology and isn't sure whether or not he wants to become an astronaut or a botanist (cue an extraordinarily well-intentioned, "_Is that an actual job?_" from Jim). He hails from San Francisco, California, has a wide array of varied and somewhat unusual talents and hobbies (such as taekwondo, and fencing, and gardening, and _crocheting_), isn't the least bit opposed to doing most of the grocery shopping and the cooking around here, and is prepared to beat each and every one of them at _Mortal Kombat_ several times during this year. He also doesn't mind that Jim never returned his email (the saint).

And then there's **Pavel Chekov**, who speaks with a Russian accent so _thick_ Jim actually has a hard time understanding him for the first **three minutes** or so of just listening to him talk, may or may not be the weirdest person he's ever met in his life, and has 'no idea what this _Mortal Kombat_ is, ahem'. Jim is astonished to learn that not only is the kid just _**sixteen**_**years**-**old**, but he's also an early high school graduate, a full-fledged _child prodigy_, a native Russian who immigrated to the States at the age of ten, and pretty much an artistic genius/musical virtuoso with a double-major in physical science and orchestral music. Oh, and he's basically some kind of anxious, hipster sheep in human form. Did I mention he's only _**sixteen**__?_

They've all moved out of the kitchen and into the living room by the time it's Jim's turn to tell them about himself, and they haven't turned the TV on and they're nearing the bottom of their pitcher of rum and coke and McCoy is lounging next to him on the couch while Sulu kicks it in the arm chair _someone_ brought in while Jim was sleeping and Chekov makes himself comfortable on the floor, and there's a moment where they all just look at Jim expectantly, not saying anything, before McCoy bumps the back of his hand against Jim's shoulder and says, "What about you, kid?"

What about him, huh?

* * *

James Tiberius Kirk was born on **March 22****nd****, 1995** at **5:51 PM** in Riverside, Iowa to George and Winona Kirk. He weighed **10 pounds**, **5 ounces**. He was named after his maternal and paternal grandfathers, respectively. His birth was a difficult one.

In the same hospital on the same day, George Kirk lost his life in the emergency room **two floors** down after colliding head-on with an eighteen-wheeler on his way to his second son's birth. When Jim tells people this story, he likes to say that he was born the exact moment in which his father croaked – a life for a life sort of thing – but in all actuality, George Kirk died several hours before Jim ever saw the piercing, clinical light of the delivery room.

The first **five years **of Jim's life were a little tricky – a concussion here, a broken collarbone there, Sam playing with him a bit too roughly and accidentally dislocating his right shoulder, and his mother so fickle in her moods and affections – but they weren't all that bad, really. He and Sam shared a bed and played tag with each other in the backyard. His peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were always cut in **four** neat little triangles. He never liked to color inside the lines and he found he favored yellow over all other hues. He formed a very profound attachment to Bugs Bunny.

He is **six years-old** when his mother marries another man. She tells him many times in his life that this man is his new father, but Jim can never bring himself to believe her.

And it is at this point that his life becomes a tempest of chaos and anger and confusion and absolute, utter _mess_.

Sam turns distant and cold and is suddenly, irrevocably out of time for anyone but himself. He is almost never home, and when he is, it is impossible to pry him from his room or have anything resembling a _decent_ conversation with him, and really, Jim doesn't like Sam all that much when the older boy is relentless in his assertion that he's a '_fucking retard_' and he refuses to look at him when he's speaking to him and when this one time, after he's come home really late and Jim catches him sneaking in through the back door in the kitchen and asks him where he's been, he looks him dead in the face and tells him, "It's your fault dad died."

(It's safe to say that Sam was a little disturbed.)

Jim is **eleven** when he's told that. He was **seven** when he first started to believe it.

His stepfather is intolerable in an entirely different way from Sam, all fiery and volcanic instead of sharp and glacial. He seems to have a not-so-hidden personal agenda to be in some way displeased or angered by Jim's every move, by the clothes he wears, by the sound of his voice, the way he pours his milk and his taste in music and television programming. Jim reasons that part of the man's vitriol has to do with the fact that he more than likely didn't sign up to become he and Sam's full-time caregiver when he married his mother, but that doesn't stop him from despising the man, doesn't rein in his sassy back-talk and, as he gets older, blatant disrespect, doesn't keep him from running away from home **four** times between the ages of **thirteen** and **sixteen**, doesn't kill the urge to remind the man every time he tries to order him around that _no_ – he _isn't_ his father.

His mother becomes a long-lost relative to him. For the first year after she remarried, she stayed with them all, and she was happy, and Jim loved her best in that year, but after it was all over with, she became more and more ghostlike in manner with each passing month. In the beginning she would only leave for **two** **weeks** or so, just enough to be worrying and painful in the way a pinch to the arm would be, but **two** **weeks** eventually turned into **a** **month**, which turned into **two** **months**, which turned into **four**, and by the time Jim was **fourteen**, he was used to not having seen his mother in almost **half** **a** **year**, used to having lost her to the thrill and the excitement and the, what, _therapeutic nature_ of Away From Them. Every once in awhile, he'd think that she'd never come back.

And of course, when she _was_ with them, she was always arguing with her husband or trying to force Jim and Sam to open up to her, which, _no_, she's the one who shut them out in the first place, and Jim knows he loves his mother and he's always known that he loves her and _yeah_, he could have normal conversations with her for the most part and _yeah_, he never really got all that angry with her except for the times when she wasn't there for him to confront her about it, but sometimes, it was really hard to look at her without seeing her features glaze over and melt, render her a faceless woman in their barren home, and when she would reach for his hand across the dinner table and say, "You know I'm proud of you, right?", Jim couldn't feel any more ashamed.

(It's safe to say that she was a little disturbed, too.)

As for Jim? Well, there's much to be said about him.

- Jim was widely regarded by his school counselors to be some kind of antisocial or emotionally unstable due to his constant instigation of fights and brawls with his fellow students, his flagrant contempt for his teachers and other authority figures, and his apparent lack of empathy or consideration for anyone around him. (Note: He wasn't antisocial or unfeeling or even _unfriendly_, really, just very, _very_ angry.)

- Jim was the kid who would laugh when the band asked for a moment of silence before the pledge of allegiance at assemblies, the kid you'd find prowling the hallways or camped out beneath the bleachers more than you would in class, the kid everyone seemed to know and talk about in scandalized, half-hushed tones even though they all knew he fascinated them more than he shocked them, even though he knew it, too.

- Jim often found himself in destructive situations, such as beneath the biggest bully in school's fist or zooming down the freeway in, you got it, his stepfather's truck or dangling off the edge of the roof of the local strip mall or mere _inches_ from busting his head on the bottom of a pool, and more often than not, he was the one who put himself in these circumstances.

- Jim played fast and loose at everything he did – school, romance, recreation, you name it. He'd skip class **three** **out** **of** **five** days of the week and still ace his exams. He'd have a girl twisted around every single one of his fingers at any given moment on any given day, and maybe even a guy or two on the side. His hobbies included jacking cars, starting fights, playing pranks, and generally making an ass out of himself. And he'd _still_ have enough time at the end of the day to get home, eat dinner, and blow through a few hours sitting on his computer.

- Jim started smoking cigarettes at the tender age of **fifteen**, and he's been a casual drinker in just the same amount of time.

- Jim took a liking to science at a young age, familiarized himself with the language of **numbers**, equations, theories and axioms, and often, when he felt particularly stressed out or worn thin, he would lose himself to the calculations of his mind – _maximize __**f(x)**__**12x**__**121/x**__ for __**x**__**0**_ – and if he ever tired of the hard, constant Earth, he'd lay out in the backyard or in the park at **eleven o'clock** at night and turn his eyes to the ever-changing sky, name the clusters of stars when he'd recognize them (which he always would) – "_Andromeda_," he'd call her name like she was an old friend, and "_Cygnus_," who the gods turned into a swan to end his ceaseless mourning, and "_Aries_," the star he'd been born under – and these are the only things Jim has ever truly enjoyed that haven't in some way destroyed him.

- Jim grew up intelligent and clever and charismatic and steadfast and with all the devilishly handsome looks in the world, but he also grew up a furious young man, full of fire and arrogance and hunger and reckless abandon that he's never been able to fully quench, not with his self-destructive behavior, not with his smoking or his drinking, not with the science and the math he'd immerse himself in just so that he could feel a little less human – _nothing_. The anger has burrowed deep beneath his skin and made a home for itself there, and well, Jim hasn't exactly found a way to evict it yet.

- Most importantly, Jim hasn't spent a day of his life free of the loneliness that seemed to have sunk its claws into him the moment his father left this world.

All this isn't so say that Jim Kirk has had an exceedingly difficult, wearisome life. He has, of course. But that's not the point.

Jim Kirk has been through times that threatened to drive him _beyond_ insane, times when he has escaped from home and then hitchhiked to the Iowan border and then nearly gotten his brains blown out at a gas station robbery and then dragged all the way back to Riverside in the back of a police car; times when he's nearly gotten expelled from school for breaking into the gym after hours and coloring the walls with vulgar graffiti; times when his stepfather has _hurt_ him, slapped him in the face and grabbed him by the wrist and Jim has punched him in retaliation, and they have fought and they have cried and Jim has promised to get him arrested for it all; times when Jim has carefully helped his mother out of the bathtub and half-carried her to bed and listened to her soft, nearly silent cries of helplessness and seen more of himself in her than he'd ever, _ever_ be able to make peace with.

Jim Kirk has also seen the sunlight just for what it is and drank root beer floats with Sam on the back porch and fallen in love with more girls than he could ever remember and went for joyrides in nice, shiny convertibles, and he has memorized the lyrics to almost every Journey song and made perfect scores on the SAT and stayed up until midnight on Christmas Eve and watched _The Lion King_ exactly eighty-seven times, and he has bought his mother the scarf she wanted for her birthday with his own money and licked coconut cake batter off of a mixing spoon and carried on all-night conversations with Sam when he let him and laughed and laughed and laughed and _laughed_ until it hurt, until his ribs were sore, until he could _feel_ how painful it was to be happy.

The punchline to all this? Not anything I could tell you.

* * *

**Sunday, August 4****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk is standing squished between one of the largest men he's ever seen in his life and Hikaru Sulu in the middle of the very crowded, very noisy quadrangle at the very center of Starfleet University campus. To Sulu's right stands Pavel Chekov, who admittedly appears as though he might have a panic attack at any moment.

"Chill, Ruski," Sulu says, good-natured and even. "We'll be able to breathe just as soon as everyone gets sorted."

(Just in case you were wondering, _no_, they are not about to put on the Sorting Hat.)

Above the mass of heads surrounding him, Jim spies a banner hung above the booth at the far north side of the quad, screaming '_HELLO FRESHMEN_' at him in large gold letters. Sweat collects at the nape of his neck and in the dips in his collarbones; the giant beside him bumps his arm against him for the **eleventh** time in the past **five minutes**.

"I hope we are sorted soon," Chekov comments, and Jim mentally congratulates himself for being able to understand the teen almost immediately after he's spoken – they've only been roommates for a good** fifteen hours** and he's already making headway.

"Yeah, me too," he agrees, throwing the kid one of his easy, flippant smiles. "Can't wait to get away from Gigantron 5000 over here."

As Jim tosses a quick glance to his left in a somewhat belated attempt to make sure Gigantron hasn't heard him, Sulu lets out a quick, almost barking laugh in response and Chekov just continues to be anxious and confused, yet adorably pleased, by his jest.

Presently, it is **9:17 AM** and Jim, Sulu, and Chekov are standing in the middle of Starfleet University's first day of freshmen orientation, waiting to get assigned to impromptu caravans so that they may tour the campus. Jim got maybe **two and a half hours** of sleep last night, no thanks to the all-day nap he took yesterday, Sulu is fiddling around on his iPhone while they wait, and Chekov keeps pulling at the hem of his tank-top and pocketing and unpocketing and repocketing his hands in his jeans in an exceptionally obvious effort to heed Sulu's advice and _chill_. Respectively, their moods are _bored_, _patient_, and _apprehensive_.

Just when it seems like Chekov might actually _pee_ himself (he reminds Jim of a toy poodle, honestly) or sink into the earth and die or something, a student with vibrant pink hair comes speeding right over to where they are in the crowd, handing out Xeroxed campus maps of varying colors at random and howling in a voice much like a police siren, "_Red maps to the lobby! Yellow maps in front of the library! Blue maps stay here! Green maps to the greenhouse! Purple maps..!_"

Jim ends up with a yellow map, Sulu with a blue, and Chekov with a red. Chekov seems to become even _more_ distressed when he notices this, as evidenced by the stricken look on his face and the interjection he utters half-under his breath, something Russian and impossibly fretful.

And for an instant, Jim is struck with the urge to help him or console him or whatever, but that such urge is quickly shot down by an internal reminder that he's kind of useless and an overbearing, typical lack of ideas (where the hell is his paperback copy of _A Guide to Being a Not-Crappy Roommate With Your Average Russian Whiz-Kid_ when he needs it, huh?). It turns out he doesn't have to do _anything_, not when it takes Sulu mere _seconds_ to do what he can't and ask everyone around them if they'd be willing to trade a red map for his blue one. It's in that moment that Jim realizes that Sulu is a much better man than he is, because even though it's kind of a good thing that he can mostly understand Chekov when he's talking, Sulu is the one who would actively try to stick by his side after knowing him for less than **twenty-four hours**, and that's not just _good_ – that's _awesome_. Talk about your moral upstandingness.

(It doesn't occur to Jim that the simple desire to comfort Chekov _at all_ is wonderful in and of itself.)

After giving both of his roommates a brief, amiable smack on the shoulder and sort of promising to meet up with them later (which, uh, might be a total lie considering the fact that after his campus tour, he's going to try to get a job at the local auto repair shop and then most likely go the fuck to _sleep_), Jim kind of just wanders around and follows a group of yellow maps until he happens upon the library, where several freshmen are slowly forming a small crowd.

At first, he's content with just hanging out towards the back of the mob and refraining from interacting with anyone in particular (especially the girl about five feet away from him who keeps gushing about how _wicked_ it is to be in college), but it isn't long before a familiar sight catches his attention – a pair of long, shapely legs, that caramel skin, the edgy pixie cut, the igneous eyes. He doesn't have to look twice before he's sauntering right up to her, hanging silent and alive by her side only a second before he's raising a hand to tap her briefly on the shoulder and effortlessly sliding into his most charismatic persona, one he thinks she'll like, one where he's going to cater to her intelligence (which he can safely assume she possesses based on the fact that she's here at Starfleet) and rile her up with how completely _doggish_ he is, and before you ask if he's fully conscious of the fact that he's doing all this and whether or not he normally custom-builds his personage to ensnare his conquests – the answer to both questions is _Yes_ with a capital _Y_.

The young woman starts a little at his touch (_she's guarded_, he muses), snapping quickly around to regard him with her sultry chocolate eyes, and as soon as she recognizes him, something in her expression sharpens and closes off. "Oh," she says without passion. "It's you."

Jim isn't fazed in the slightest. This isn't the first time a girl's been less than impressed with him (and it certainly won't be the last).

"I think the gods of color-coding have smiled upon me today," he quips instead of commenting on her lack of enthusiasm, letting a whisper of smirk fix itself upon his face. "How's your shirt?"

"_Clean_, not that you'd have anything to do with it." Her eyes flick away from his for a second, graze downwards, somewhere around his collarbone. She's precise when she adjusts the crimson folds in her blouse.

"I can reimburse you for that, you know," he says in a purposefully ambiguous tone. He doesn't expect her to see right through it, doesn't expect her to just stare at him and reply,

"What, with dinner? So you can spill more beverages on me?" She turns away from him in a not-so-subtle show of '_lay the fuck off_'. "Not interested, sorry."

Something tells Jim she isn't sorry at all. Whatever, she can play hard to get – he's good at that game anyway.

"I never _did_ catch your name," he goes on without missing a beat, adjusting his position relative to her so that she can't _not_ see him, but not so that she's looking right at him; he's good at being intentionally aggravating and present like that. "Would you care to enlighten me with that information?"

Instead of answering his question, she hisses a quiet, "_Shh_," at him, and suddenly everyone is going quiet and Jim is feeling a little affronted until Miss Caramel points directly ahead of her and he's all but forced to follow her finger with his eyes. That's when he sees him for the first time.

(And see, you can tell right now just by the way I worded it that the deuteragonist of this whole charade is about to be introduced. Sit down and relax, though. This is going to take awhile.)

He's lithe and tall, just an inch or two taller than Jim himself, and the first thing Jim notices about him is the vivid blue of his shirt, an almost indigo color, and that every button up to his neck is secured and the cuffs of his sleeves are neatly folded, his collar not one bit askew. Then there are his legs, which (much like the goddess to Jim's left's do) go on for eons and are encased in straight-leg black jeans, casting him in all dark hues that make him stand out in the sea of pastel or otherwise faded colors everyone else is wearing. His student ID hangs loosely around his neck – Jim can tell by the coloring of it that he's a sophomore.

Then there is the intensity of his face, and not just in expression, but in the large triangle of his nose, his oddly-shaped lips (which turn up at the corners the tiniest bit and leave him with this default look of vague, constant amusement) and the inky, severe arch of his eyebrows (which offset that previously-mentioned guise of mirth and turn it into something more calculating and shrewd). His shiny raven hair, cut short and neat, contrasts starkly with his pale, slightly olive-toned skin, and his eyes are dark and soulful. Jim thinks he looks like a complete and total nerd.

(Years from now, Jim will think back to this day and remember how the first time he saw this man, he thought he was the geekiest person he'd ever laid eyes on, and he will have never felt so silly or so _right_ in his entire life.)

And then the guy opens his mouth and proceeds to out himself as a possible android when he says, "Good morning, fellow students. My name is Spock, and I will be your campus guide for the next hour or so."

Jim didn't know what to expect he would hear when he started talking, but this _Spock's_ voice sounds exactly like that of one of the many uncanny valley-esque automatons he's seen in science fiction movies his whole life – a bit soft and articulate and with almost no nuances or inflections besides the one that keeps it from being completely robotic, and it's almost pear-shaped, almost soothing, save for the fact that Jim is squinting trying to look for any hinges in the man's jaws or a red glint in his eyes.

"I ask that you feel free to voice your questions and comments and please endeavor to pay attention and keep up," Spock goes on, coolly skimming his gaze over everyone present with the sort of practiced elegance that makes Jim feel awkward and uncomfortable (mostly because he reasons it isn't _human_ and it stands at contrast with his own innate baseness).

"O-_kay_, C-3PO," Jim comments under his breath, quietly enough so that only the students in his near vicinity can hear him. Miss Caramel scoffs beside him.

And so it goes that Jim, Miss Caramel, and about thirty other freshmen begin their tour of Starfleet University campus under the graceful and meticulous direction of Spock, who first leads them on a brief sweep of the library and then takes them from building to building to building – the observatory, the medical school, the art center, the philosophy department – and all the while, Jim busies himself with wondering how in the hell one is expected to be totally familiar with the geography of this place (because honestly, there are easily over _**forty**_ facilities on this single goddamned campus) and offhandedly flirting with She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named, who regularly (and unsuccessfully) attempts to escape his side. Spock engages the tour group in small bouts of trivia and a little light quizzing – things that Jim mostly yawns at and Miss Caramel responds to with surprising earnest and knowledgeability.

"Are you actually interested in this?" he asks her at one point, when they've stopped in front of the anthropology hall and Spock is explaining the importance of the study to a couple of curious students. He stretches his arms above his head in an exaggerated display of boredom (and so that his shirt rides up on his belly, but hey, who's keeping count?).

"As shocking as it may be to you, _yes_," she replies with a particularly dour glance in his direction. "If you're _not_, I suggest that you leave."

"And let you miss me?" he shoots back. He nearly bursts into flames at the responding look she gives him.

"I _swear_, you wouldn't know game if it was sitting right under your nose," she says, and before he can contradict her or prove her wrong (because _yes_, he's extremely well-acquainted with _game_ and he has been for years), she's putting on her best smile and answering some question Spock asked that Jim didn't hear. Just like yesterday, Jim is feeling a little winded yet all too pleased by her resolve (mainly because it only means his victory will be that much sweeter in the end when she finally gives in to him, of course).

That all changes when at the end of the tour, Jim looks up to see that she's disappeared and promptly finds her about **ten feet** away from him seconds later, standing with – of all people – _Spock_.

She's saying something to him, something Jim can't catch, something Spock replies to with an expression almost like relief coloring his features. They're in each other's personal space.

She smiles at him with all her teeth.

He smiles back at her, a slight, subtle thing.

Jim still doesn't know her name.

He drops off his resume at the local auto repair shop and meets Sulu, Chekov, and McCoy at the cafeteria for lunch at **12:13 PM**. Chekov babbles on excitedly about how beautiful the campus is, McCoy grumbles about the nutritional value of the hamburgers, and Jim manages to simultaneously amuse and gross everyone out by jamming a French fry up each nostril and calling himself a walrus. So what if he doesn't know her name.

At least he knows theirs.

* * *

**Sunday, August 4****th****, 2013 – Sunday, August 11****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk's first week of college is surreal, to say the least.

After sitting down with Sulu and Chekov over a pitcher of vodka-spiked strawberry smoothie (which Sulu is careful to make sure Chekov doesn't drink too much of), Jim finds that he and Sulu take both their _Theoretical Mechanics_ and _Quantum Mechanics_ classes together and that he also shares _English I_ with Chekov. They draw up a plan to support each other in getting up for class, or whatever, one that primarily entails Sulu taking full responsibility for everyone and Jim taking none at all. Meanwhile, McCoy shuffles around in the kitchen and calls them all infants.

They also get together to work out a bathroom schedule for the mornings and evenings so that they don't all end up drowning each other in the bathtub in a fit of unhygienic rage. Bones and Chekov have shower privileges in the morning while Jim and Sulu have full reign at night. They color code their toothbrushes with masking tape to avoid confusion and any swapping of germs (much to McCoy's immense relief).

Jim and Bones spend **four and a half hours** one night unpacking and organizing their things in their shared room. Jim wins the closet space after half-seriously threatening to pee in it; McCoy claims that the desk is rightfully his seeing as he's the one who'd actually _use_ it most of the time. They find that they wear the same shoe size, McCoy accuses Jim of being a 'wangster' for owning two pairs of Air Jordans, and Jim learns that McCoy has a slight fetish for cowboy boots. Bones vocally disagrees with Jim's Nirvana poster and Jim rifles through the man's CD collection, which consists of Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, and more Bob Dylan. Mostly, they banter and jam out and laugh and drink beer, and by the night is over, Jim and McCoy have discovered that they are insane and hypochondriac, respectively, and Jim is beyond thankful to have McCoy as his roommate.

Miss Caramel turns out to be in Jim's English class as well (a sign from the Fates, no doubt), and every day before instruction begins, Jim will linger by her desk and pester her for as long as she'll let him and longer, engage her in only partially-playful repartee and attempt to sneak glances at her student ID so that he might _finally_ be able to learn her name (to no avail, of course).

"Is it because you're dating Marvin the Paranoid Android?" he asks her on Friday, his arms crossed on top of her desk as he squats in front of it. He likes giving people names, you see.

"We're _not_ dating," she snaps after she realizes who he's referring to, irritated and impatient and, if Jim didn't know any better, disappointed.

She obviously still doesn't care for him all that much. However, she _does_ seem to take a liking to Chekov, who is just as polite and adorable and turns out to be a total _babe magnet_ in the way that he's young and cute and apparently Jim's protege, or something. Yet again, Jim gives thanks to whatever deity blessed him with the roommates he has.

Freshmen orientation lasts all week. Every day, there are new activities lined up for the underclassmen to take part in before, between, and after classes – small sports tournaments, field days, rallies, even a talent competition. Jim beats Sulu in the 100-meter dash and Chekov gets them both in the discus throw. All of them score highly in _Trivial Pursuit_ and drink way too much alcohol, and on Friday, Jim gets to watch Sulu perform capoeira and listen to Chekov play the cello in the talent show. They drag McCoy along with them most days because, according to Jim, he doesn't have anything better to do, not to mention the fact that the impossibly pleased look on Chekov's face when he agrees to chaperone them is too sweet to pass up more than once.

And even though they don't actually know each other all that well, in that first week, it certainly feels like they do. Bones will entertain them with his stories of how his sisters often liked to stick his hair in short little pigtails when he was little and the time his mother and her brother-in-law wrestled in the mud of their backyard after a particularly heated disagreement and all the family dinners he won't ever forget (the ones his ears will never recover from, he says), and Sulu cooks almost every day – boneless ribs and tilapia and lasagna and falafel – and teaches Jim how to make a base and makes sure they're all at least somewhat alert by the time **7:30** rolls around, and Jim tells them all about the crazy girlfriends he's had over the years (like the one who insisted she was the reincarnation of Cleopatra and another who legitimately stripped all of her clothes off and stood _naked_ in his backyard until he agreed to let her inside) and the gas station story and shows them the various scars he's acquired growing up – the faded burn mark on his lower arm, the welt across his right shoulderblade, the small tear in his lip – and one night, when Jim and Bones are sitting around in the living room debating the comedic value of _That 70's Show_ and Sulu is enjoying his shower time, Chekov walks up to them and asks with his accent thick and his eyes drowsy, "Do you zink ve are all friends now?"

McCoy makes a noise like laughter and derision all at once. "We damn well better be," is his response.

Jim gets the job at the auto shop and works on **Tuesday** and **Saturday** in the morning and on **Wednesday** in the afternoon. He doesn't study or anything, but he gets his homework done and shows up to class on time (because believe it or not, he _does_ care about his future). Between all the to-and-fro and the endless activity of the day and the necessary time spent drinking peach schnapps and playing _Skyrim_ with his roommates and simple tasks like bathing and eating and brushing his teeth and such, Jim has never in his life been so thoroughly _exhausted_, never ingested so much coffee on a daily basis, never _puked_ so much as a result of the dual consumption of caffeine and alcohol, and never felt so _great_ about himself. It's an enlightening experience, really, to wake up slightly hungover after maybe **five hours** of sleep and then proceed to fix up a car or two, grab a quick lunch, master quantum mechanics, nap through calculus, and then spend the rest of the day injecting himself into the metaphorical veins of the student body or listening to slam poetry with Chekov or getting his ass kicked in _Mortal Kombat_ by Sulu or listening to McCoy harp on about the malevolence of immunization, and then to sit out on his dorm's fire escape, cigarette in hand, and let himself look at the stars that got him here in the first place.

He may get in a fight or two.

He may not physically feel the greatest when he gets up in the morning.

He may have small anxiety attacks in the shower or in bed some nights, and McCoy may ask him if he's alright and sit on the sliver of mattress Jim isn't occupying, just typing away on his laptop, until Jim finally answers him by gently knocking his knuckles against his shoulder, a silent '_yes_'.

He may fall a little in love with the caramel girl whose name still escapes him, may grow slightly infatuated with the tiny flames in her eyes and the way she refuses to stand for his bullshit, refuses to allow him to stand for it either.

He may feel like he doesn't deserve it all sometimes.

But the stars remind him that he does, remind him to go back inside and ask Chekov if he wants to watch with him and tell Sulu that his chicken marsala is fucking _delicious_ and give Bones half a coronary when he jokingly tells him he accidentally used his toothbrush and finish his reading assignment before there's a chance he could fall asleep on it.

* * *

**Monday, August 12****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk begins his career as a potential stalker.

Well, that's a bit of a misconception and an exaggeration, to be honest, but from an exceptionally observant bystander's point of view, it's not all that off the mark. Here, let me explain.

On **Monday, August 12****th**, Jim finds himself accidentally trailing Miss Caramel out of their English class. He promises Chekov that he'll meet him and Sulu and McCoy in the cafeteria in **fifteen minutes**, then promptly forgets all about that and focuses his energy on staying about twenty feet behind the young woman on her way out of the classroom, down the stairs, and past the English building to wherever she's headed to.

In hindsight, Jim reasons that he's following her because she took a few minutes longer than usual to gather her things at the end of class and he just so happened to notice and, as a result, fixate his entire universe on her (and if you hadn't figured it out yet, he kind of has one of the most compulsive personalities of all time). _Yes_, it's creepy and inappropriate and maybe even a little perverted. _Yes_, he is aware of the fact that he could end up with a face full of mace or a swift kick to the groin if he gets caught. _Yes_, he is a complete and utter idiot (and _no_, that's probably not going to change soon).

They end up at the library, where Jim lingers half-hidden in the shade of an old magnolia tree while he watches Miss Caramel disappear beyond the heavy double-doors adorned with float glass, her messenger bag slung over one shoulder and a small stack of notebooks balanced in her left arm. He hesitates there, unusually thoughtful.

You see, Jim isn't good at losing or feeling inadequate, and that's a huge part of why he's here and not having lunch with his friends right now. If he were being totally honest with himself, he'd know that it really _does_ upset him on a very basic level that he hasn't won this girl over yet (who does she think she _is_, rejecting _him?_), never mind that he could have any pick of women (or men, for that matter) he wanted at this school just based on his looks and charm alone. It's entitlement and male privilege and downright frustration that's got him following her right now, but here's the thing – that's not all there is to Jim.

He's considering whether or not it's a good idea to go into the library and find her. There's a **87% **chance she'll rebuke him if he approaches her and a **25%** chance he won't approach her _at all _out of respect for his own physical wellbeing, but then again, he's anything if not stupidly confrontational and determined on the best of days. There's also the fact that he's hungry and oh _yeah_, he _did_ promise Chekov he would be in the lunchroom like,**_two minutes_**_ ago_, but getting told off by a beautiful woman somehow seems a whole lot more appealing than eating grilled cheese and cobb salad. On the other hand, the likelihood of him looking like the asshole he is to his roommates and perhaps getting assaulted with a pair of puppy eyes courtesy of Chekov would go up maybe **16%** if he ditched them. _And_ (again) he's kind of starving. _And_ he likes his face (a lot) as well as his balls (probably even more). _And_ there's a possibility he won't be able to find his caramel girl – the library _is_ only **four** stories high, after all. As the magic eight-ball says, all signs point to the cafeteria.

Jim is mere seconds from turning his ass around and heading in the direction of food and friendship when a particularly disgruntled sophomore he managed to piss off last week catches his eye from maybe **three yards** away. Just like that, he's zipping his way into the library, good ideas (and his stomach) be damned.

It takes a little over** five minutes** of furtive, pseudo-casual searching for Jim to locate her on the **second floor**, sitting alone at a study table covered nearly edge-to-edge in binders, textbooks, notebooks, and various other academic materials like pens and flashcards. When he finds her, she's reading a passage in one of her textbooks, her expression clear and full of concentration and the fingers of her left hand resting delicately against her jaw, the wine-colored polish on her nails contrasting nicely with her skin.

And you know, he almost leaves right then and there, almost keeps himself from disturbing her when she looks so serene and pretty in her own little bubble of concentration, too perfect to be popped. He's almost satisfied with just letting her be and jetting over to the cafeteria like he was going to do in the first place. _Almost_.

But Jim has never been one for perfection and he's always had a thing for getting under people's skin, so instead of being smart and considerate and everything he's so far from being, he saunters over to her table and stands opposite her and says, "That's a _whole_ lot of studying you got going on there."

She doesn't jump or anything, but her head cocks up swiftly when she looks at him and her face goes from tranquil to cross in nearly no time, her eyebrows angling irritably and her cheeks hollowing incrementally (her expressions of anger are very subtle, Jim has noticed). "Oh my _God_–"

"What is this, _Accelerated Calculus?_" He briefly lifts the edge of one opened textbook to examine the cover. "You majoring in mathematics or something?"

"That's none of your busine–" She cuts herself off, hand shooting forward to quickly slap at his as she snaps, "Would you _stop_ touching that?"

"I'd like to make it my business," he says in response to her unfinished statement, unruffled and insouciant. He easily kicks the chair he's standing half-behind away from the table and drops down into it, doesn't tear his eyes away from her face for one second. "What are you into, huh? We might have something in common."

"We _might_ just have to take this outside," she retorts, sitting straight and stiff in her seat and narrowing her eyes at him the tiniest bit. _She just threatened to fight me like a man_, Jim realizes in a small haze of shock.

"See? We _are_ alike," he laughs, heedless of the sour looks he's getting shot by various students attempting to study in his vicinity.

"Oh? How so?" Her tone is more vindictive than it is curious.

Jim smirks, obnoxiously self-satisfied. "We both like it rough," he purrs. He is abruptly reminded of the phrase '_if looks could kill_', then.

"Listen," she says, her voice a sharp sliver of intent. "I don't know if you're actively _trying_ to piss me off or you're just extraordinarily bad at taking a hint–"

"You never know, I could be both–"

"If you cut me off again, I just might rip your head off." She is almost _scarily_ serious when she says that, all quiet and solemn and perfectly articulate, with absolutely nothing but her stare betraying just how _livid_ she is. "Do you understand me?"

Because he is still insistent on being a total _moron_, Jim replies, "Well, _you're_ the one who said I was bad at taking hints. _Do_ I?"

She looks like she's actually going to _murder_ him for that remark. Jim watches his life flash before his eyes as the muscles of her jowls tighten, her fingers curl into a tight fist on the tabletop, her eyes turn into two blazing pits of hellfire, and then _that's it_, he's done for, tell his mother he loves her and make sure the papers know he tried as hard as he could –

"What the hell is wrong with you?" she asks instead of, I don't know, _launching_ herself across the table at him and sinking her jaws into his jugular, and now, it's obvious that she's struggling not to lose her shit or make a scene or _scream _at him, and Jim finds that not only is he intimidated by her anger – he's _intrigued_ by it as well (and he's just the type of person who likes to play with fire).

"Would it surprise you if I told you that's not the first time I've been asked that question?" he replies, this time with a touch of seriousness coloring his tone.

She scowls darkly at him, biting her words as they leave her. "_No_, not in the slightest."

And because Jim is actually curious and because this is what brought him all the way up here and to her table in the first place, he tilts his head just slightly and says, "Look, what's so awful about me wanting to get to know you? I just spilled a little coffee on you and I apologized for it right after, so what did I do that was so unforgivable?" He might not sound entirely earnest, but that's because he _isn't_ (after all, he _knows_ he didn't do anything wrong, right?).

"Have you ever considered that it might be how _relentlessly_ you're trying to get into my pants that's bothering me?" she replies without missing a beat.

"I thought girls were supposed to like that sort of thing." Like I said, _still_ an idiot.

"Maybe where _you_ come from," she snaps. Her knuckles tense and shift atop the table. "Where I come from, it's considered rude and degrading."

"So you must know that I don't mean any harm," he points out with a smirk. Again, something murderous and lethal flashes in her eyes, and her expression turns into one of outright _fury_ when she leans forward and snarls,

"You must be some kind of _fucked-up_ if you think you're being _cute_ or _charming_ or whatever the hell the idiots back in your hometown made you believe you are, you self-centered son of a –"

And then, out of fucking _nowhere_ and in that distinctive, unusually soft tone – "Is there a problem, Nyota?" – and when Jim looks up, there Spock is, book in hand, in all his prim-and-proper, arched eyebrow-having, blue sweater-wearing, freakishly android-esque glory.

But that's not what catches Jim's attention.

"_Nyota?_" he asks, sweeping his eyes over the woman before him as if seeing her for the very first time. He savors the taste of her name on the palate of his mind, slowly, over and over again. Nyota. _Nyota_. "Is that foreign?"

"Oh, _get out_ of here," Nyota (_Nyota!_) groans at the exact same moment that Spock asks him, "And who might you be?" The look on both of their faces the second after that vocal collision has taken place is _Kodak_-worthy (and may I just draw some attention to the fact that the volume in this corner of the library has gone up maybe **45%** since Jim sat his ass down here?).

Unable to help himself and unfortunately suffering from a condition known to most as _chronic jackass syndrome_, Jim turns his attention to Spock and goes, "What's it to you?"

Spock simply stares at him for a beat, gives Jim this unwavering, intense obsidian gaze that makes him squirm uneasily in his chair, and then he says, in no uncertain terms and so matter-of-factly it's almost comical, "You're in my seat."

_Oh_.

"_Accelerated Calculus_, huh?" Jim blathers instead of making any move to get up, gesturing blithely to the textbook from earlier. "I'm guessing _you're_ the mathematician in this outfit, am I right?" Nyota rolls her eyes; Spock's brow crumples a bit in what may or may not be confusion. "Which reminds me –" Jim glances between the two. "Is this something I should be worried about?"

"You shouldn't be worried about _anything _because _none_ of this is your _business_," is Nyota's growling response. She looks like she's prepared to say more, but Spock briefly touches a finger to the fist she has balled up on top of the table – a grounding action that Jim can only watch in total puzzlement – and reminds her,

"Nyota, this is a library." It disconcerts Jim how easily she pipes down at that, how eerily _dispassionate_ Spock is. Spock fixes his dark gaze on him once more, says, "You still haven't answered my question."

"Oh?" He folds his arms behind his head, insolent and nonchalant. "Could you run that by me again?"

"Who are you?" The response is instantaneous.

"He's a self-absorbed _asshole_, that's who," Nyota comments, inciting a quick, amused smirk out of Jim.

"That too," he purrs with a wink. She rolls her eyes again, more irritably this time. "My name is James Tiberius Kirk, monsieur. You can call me Jim."

Spock raises one sharp brow at him. "Duly noted." His tone grows even more solemn, if possible, when he goes on to ask, "And may I inquire as to why, Mr. Kirk, you are so insistent on inflaming Ms. Uhura's temper?"

"_Nyota Uhura_," Jim marvels rather than giving Spock a straightforward reply (because, unsurprisingly, he's _still_ not taking any of this that seriously). He grins at Nyota, spreading his arms as if to concede some sort of victory to her. "I gotta say, that's a _beautiful_ nam–"

"The _question_, Mr. Kirk," Spock cuts in, and he doesn't say it too harshly or with any sort of antagonistic intent, but the clipped, no-nonsense tone of his voice makes Jim _extraordinarily_ uncomfortable, makes him feel as though someone has shoved a metal rod up his spine, because _what_, this guy is a _year_ older than him and he's talking to him like a _teacher_ would, all high and mighty and so sure of himself, and we all know how Jim feels about teachers, especially the ones who try to order him around and tell him what to do, who the _fuck_ does he think he is –

"Why the hell does it matter to you?" Jim asks, a little rougher than he imagined he would.

Unfettered, Spock replies, "It matters to me because it matters to Ms. Uhura." His voice is just as even and calm as it has been since he showed up out of the void. "I would now ask you to remove yourself with consideration to how much you've vexed her –"

"Has anyone ever told you they needed a dictionary to understand what you're saying?" Jim blurts.

And then, for the very first time since Jim ever laid eyes on him, Spock looks _irritated_, his dark brows drawing together into a tense triangle at the center of his forehead, his lips tightening into a thin, taut little line. In the distance, there is the sound of trumpets and the beating of drums and a cavalry and _We Are the Champions_ by Queen blaring at full volume.

"Excuse me?" Spock says, and again, his voice isn't particularly sharp or anything, but there's this barely audible strain tugging at the back of it and this undeniable glint of exasperation in his eyes that is giving Jim so much _life_ right now.

"Oh, nothing," Jim replies, practically _hopping_ out of Spock's chair and watching almost _manically_ as the man's expression grows infinitesimally crosser. "I'll just be getting out of your way now, you know, since you asked nice." He claps a hand against Spock's shoulder as he makes his way off, _taunting_ him, observes with something like _glee _as man bodily flinches in response to the contact.

And then, before he's totally out of range, he remembers himself, turns mid-pace to throw a cheekily merry grin and a loose peace sign their way, and – because he has something of a death wish – crows, "Catch you on the flip side, Spock, Nyota!"

Amidst the incensed groans of '_shut up!_' and '_good riddance_' all across the floor, Nyota snaps, "That's _Uhura_ to you!"

_Uhura_. He can get down with _Uhura_.

The last thing Jim sees before he's booking it for an elevator is that gloriously peeved look on Spock's marble face. He's almost entirely certain he's never going to see the man again after that.

_Boy_, is he mistaken.

* * *

**Tuesday, August 13****th**** , 2013 – Friday, August 16****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk starts seeing them _everywhere_.

He's hanging out with McCoy in the quad on **Tuesday** afternoon, playfully reading the man's medical text aloud from over his shoulder in a deliberate attempt to be annoying, and McCoy is correcting him with a brusque, "That's not how you pronounce _onychomycosis_, you child," when Jim catches them in his periphery. He doesn't hear Bones chewing the word out at him – _"__**AH**__-nee-__**COH**__-my-__**COH**__-siss_" – as he watches Spock and Uhura walk side-by-side across the green, engaged in a conversation he can't make out from six yards away. She has her notebooks folded in the crook of her left arm like she always does. He's wearing a different sweater than the one he was sporting yesterday, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, still undeniably _blue_ (this time, it's a shade close to periwinkle). They're not holding hands, but they look like they should be (and maybe even like they want to be).

And Jim can't bring himself to stop stupidly gawking at them as they sit at one of the unoccupied benches dotting the quadrangle, can't rend his eyes from from Uhura's crossed legs and Spock's neat crop of hair and the meager bit of space between them until Bones is in his ear going, "_Hello_, Earth to Jim?", and he's focusing his attention on flipping the pages of the man's textbook several chapters backwards, laughing mercilessly and obnoxiously in response to his spirited protesting.

He swears up and down that he and Spock don't make eye contact the second before he looks away.

(He's wrong.)

Of course, then there's **Wednesday** morning, when Jim sees Uhura in English and, for once, doesn't make a move to speak to her or do anything more than offer her than a customarily charming smile (one she greets with an icy glare, mind you). It's when he passes Spock on his way to his car afterwards that he starts to freak out a little (and when I say _freak out_, I mean give the guy about **three** or **four** double takes and release these silent, semi-panicked little '_what the fuck_'s into the cab of his truck as he drives off to work, because _yeah_, he _is_ a wee bit paranoid that Spock may or may not be keeping an eye on him or something creepy and overprotective like that), and even later that same day, when he's accompanying Sulu to the campus bookstore so he can pick out a postcard to send his parents, he notices _both_ of them several aisles away, casually perusing the encyclopedias, and proceeds to have a miniature panic attack on the spot. He makes so much of a scene trying to get Sulu to hurry up and buy his postcard so they can get the _fuck_ out of there ("– just go with the damn Empire State Building, they gave birth to you, man, of course they'll love it –") that there's no doubt in his mind that they saw him as well.

And on **Thursday**? He spots them a grand total of _**four**_ times all throughout the day – when he's walking to class with Sulu, taking a stroll with Chekov, grabbing a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, hell, when he and McCoy are getting ready to go on a fucking _beer run_ at **nine o'clock** in the evening – he _sees_ them, together and apart, and I wouldn't be lying if I told you he was convinced he's _cracking _up because of it.

It's not that he doesn't _want_ to see them (specifically Uhura, for that matter) and it's not that he's afraid of confrontation (he never _has_ been). It's not even so much his irrational theory that Spock is checking up on him. It's the fact that he's not even _trying_ to be an uncomfortable presence in their lives, and yet for some reason, he's succeeding perfectly at doing just that. What are the odds that he'd run into the same two people _**seven**__ fucking times_ over the course of only **three days** on a campus as large as Starfleet's and without a clue as to where they live or even _who they are_ on a personal level?

(The answer: very small, but very real.)

And of course, all the while this accidental game of tag is going on, Jim doesn't stop pondering the curious case of Spock and Uhura's relationship status. He never sees them doing anything explicitly romantic, doesn't even catch them holding hands, but Uhura's peculiar defensiveness where that question is concerned, his lack of a clear answer, and the sheer amount of times he sees them together makes him wonder, you know? (It never occurs to him that they could simply be very close friends.)

He's chilling out with his laptop and a can of Sprite in the shade of a magnolia tree in the quad again on **Friday** afternoon, just after **3:00**, when he sees them yet _another_ time, sitting at a wrought iron table about fifteen feet away from him and conversing over their cups of coffee and their textbooks.

Now, at this point, Jim is seriously starting to consider himself scorned by some kind of supernatural force, so he takes a few moments to peer imploringly, _helplessly_, at the blue shards of sky peeking at him from between the magnolias and the leaves above him. He silently apologizes to whatever heavenly being may be looking down upon him in that moment for anything shitty he might have done in his short life – "_Sorry for stealing Mr. Harrison's car, sorry for never calling whatsername back like I promised I would, sorry for punching Sam in the face, even though he kind of deserved it..._" – before returning his gaze to the table, foolishly expecting Spock and Uhura to have magically disappeared in some form of divine mercy.

Unsurprisingly, they're _still_ there, sipping their cappuccinos and being just as classy and studious as they always are. Jim Kirk has retained his status as a damned man.

At first, Jim is ready to grab his shit and get the hell out of dodge, maybe go find Bones and make his life a little harder for **an hour** or **two**, but something keeps him from moving, something that, to a guy like him, walks and talks a whole lot like _enlightenment_.

Why should he have to go out of his way to avoid them? Why is he freaking out so much over a simple coincidence? And when the hell did it become acceptable for him to be so completely affected by another human being, let alone_ two?_

These are the questions Jim is asking himself as he continues to stay exactly where he is and stare rather imperviously at Spock and Uhura, completely lost to the article he was previously reading on his computer. In his all-consuming idiocy where they (in addition to most other people) are concerned, he is not aware that he's been gawking at them an awful lot this week, only that he is mysteriously familiar with both of their mannerisms and that he's sort of-kind of _captivated_ by their existence. He is also oblivious to the fact that he's been pretty unsubtle about his unintentional fascination with them. He is _also_ unable to notice that Spock is staring _back_ at him until he manages to tear his eyes away from Uhura, who is currently engrossed in her textbook, and _shit_, that would be small splinters discomfort spiking in the pit of Jim's stomach and tiny flashes of red flaring up in his mind and what little bit of common sense he may possess leaving him in one big stupid _rush_, and Spock is just _watching_ him so damn intently and with that freakishly impassive look he's always got on his face, as if there's some sort of jam in his wiring that prevents him from expressing any sort of human emotion or maybe even like he spent the first thirteen years of his life locked in a fucking _basement_ or something (Jim saw a documentary about a girl that happened to once and couldn't stop freaking out about it for _months_), and Jim is panicking and uncomfortable and not at all ashamed, so do you know what he does?

He _smiles_ at the guy, a quick, toothy, nervous quirk of the lips that ignites an infinitesimal spark of curiosity in Spock's mostly unreadable expression. The man's eyebrow twitches.

Jim watches, nearly terrified, as Spock turns back to Uhura, _says something_ to her (what was that? Jim can't hear anything over the sound of his own _stupidity_), and then gets to his feet and starts _walking towards him_, still just as vague and as eerie as can be. Uhura doesn't make any move to look his way or even respond to whatever the hell Spock told her with more than a brief nod, so Jim can only assume that the man didn't blow his cover (as if he _has_ a cover to speak of).

And when Spock reaches him, stops about five feet away from where he's sitting on the grass, the man asks him, "Why have you taken to pursuing Ms. Uhura and myself over the course of the past four days?"

Jim's initial instinct is to contradict him, tell him he's really not _trying_ to stalk them even though it more than definitely looks like he is, but because he has no mind/mouth filter and he's still _Jim Kirk_, instead, he says, "Still talking like a dictionary, huh?"

Spock's eyebrow twitches again, but otherwise, his expression continues to not change and he continues to be a fucking robot. "Resorting to petty insults will not help you," he says, like he's pointing it out to Jim for his benefit.

"Should I start calling you Webster?" Jim blurts, but before Spock can, I don't know, _beat_ him with a verbal yardstick, he quickly and awkwardly attaches a, "I'm _not_ stalking you guys, okay?" to the end of his jest, and he may or may not be gazing _really_ intently at Spock's face right now, because it actually kind of _rivets_ him that a guy as young as Spock probably is (**nineteen** is his best guess) would have such an oddly formal, atonal manner of speaking. Was he raised in Buckingham Palace or something?

"You're not?" Spock asks, and he doesn't voice the question like he's confirming Jim's statement or even like he's particularly disbelieving of it; it could almost be considered _rhetorical_, really, but Jim isn't sure so he just kind of gives him this dumb shake of the head. Spock's brow shifts the tiniest bit as he goes on to say, "Then why have I observed you in almost every place we have been for the majority of this week? Are you suggesting that this is a mere coincidence?"

Jim nods a bit slowly. "Yeah, pretty much," he replies, and because he's actually a little lost, he asks, "Are you angry right now? Because I really can–"

"I'm not angry," Spock swiftly clarifies. "I am only curious, as well as somewhat concerned for your wellbeing."

Well, _that_ throws Jim for a loop.

"Why would _you_ be worried about _me?_" he laughs, a snorting, incredulous thing accompanied by one of his more impudent smiles. Honestly, he can't even help himself at this point in his life; he's just come to expect his immune system, or whatever, to automatically respond to any sort of human kindness by compelling him to act like a gigantic asshole.

Jim could swear that Spock almost _smiles_ at him then, slight and subtle and only with one corner of his mouth, and the man averts his gaze for a moment as he absently smooths down the front of his denim (_blue!_) shirt before quickly returning his eyes to Jim and replying, nearly _amused_, "Should Ms. Uhura become aware of your recurring presence, I presume she would not take too kindly to you."

"Touché," Jim sighs, suddenly understanding the odd whisper of delight in Spock's expression. His demeanor temporarily sobers as he adds, "But I mean, I'm _not_ following you guys, or at least I'm not trying to." He then lets out a brief chuckle. "Maybe it's fate that we keep on bumping into each other, huh?"

"I do not believe in fate," is Spock's simple answer. It leaves Jim just as uncomfortable and confused as he was before this conversation even began, which reminds him...

"Are you two dating or not?" The question is clumsy, abrupt, maybe even fairly inappropriate (but hey, it's not as if Jim has never been any of those things). When Jim realizes this and Spock gives him a slightly inquisitive look, he scrambles to offer an explanation (because for some obscure reason he feels like he _owes_ one to this guy – someone he just _barely_ knows and has insulted on several different occasions over the course of their five-day relationship). "I mean, Uhura wouldn't say anything and I'm not gonna go out of my way to steal some other guy's gi–"

"For Ms. Uhura's sake," Spock cuts him off, slipping his hands into the pockets of his trousers and fixing Jim with an indecipherable look. "I'm going to say yes."

_**What?**_

That word – _what?_ – is the only thing Jim can hear ricocheting around in his head while he watches Spock retreat, his back a broad blue plane of unanswered questions and stony indifference. He can only imagine what his face must be doing as he keeps his eyes glued to the man, who reclaims his seat across from Uhura, says something brief to her, and then proceeds to continue studying, not looking back at Jim for even an instant.

Jim has never rushed to get home _so fast_.

He's in his dorm room in a record **three minutes** (which is kind of a big deal considering that Starfleet campus is a little over **270 square acres** and he's carrying his backpack and a half-full beverage), all but slamming the door and letting loose a rallying cry of sorts – "_Bones_, where the _fuck_ are you?!"

You see, McCoy happens to be just as good at listening as he is at complaining, and ever since that first day when he opened up to Jim (if you consider unreservedly bitching about bathroom sanitation to be _opening up_, that is) and put him to bed like he might have known him for _years_ instead of only **fifteen minutes**, Jim has come to subconsciously consider the man his closest confidant. He's never been a particularly whiny person or anything, but whenever he needs to air his thoughts (mostly just so he can get them out of his head for **a second or two**), Bones is his go-to guy, and he _never_ disappoints.

"What happened?" McCoy's voice comes sailing out from their room several moments before he appears, idly scratching at the stubble covering his jaw and carrying a book of crossword puzzles in his hand (because Bones is _really_ passionate about those kinds of things). He gives Jim a vaguely disappointed look, like he already knows he's done _something_ wrong. "Did you finally get yer ass kicked by that woman you've been doggin'?"

"I think she's dating an android," Jim says instead of answering McCoy directly. "Except I can't really tell because _neither_ of them want to give me a straight answer. It's like they're allergic to doing things the easy way or something."

Bones makes his way over to the sofa and plops down as Jim speaks, refraining to look up from his crossword puzzle. "An _android?_" he asks, incredulous.

"_Yes_, a fucking _android_," Jim practically explodes in a heavy gust of air. He starts thoughtlessly pacing about the living room, not moving to put his backpack or his soda down. "And _she_ nearly bites my face off every time I ask her and _he's_ about as useful as a, as a..."

"As a tit on a boar hog?" Bones pipes. Jim stops being excited just long enough to shoot the man a look of utter astonishment.

"Whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean," he snorts, and when McCoy doesn't make a comment or do anything but give him this brief nod that could honestly mean _anything_, he shrugs and resumes his moaning and groaning.

"I mean – I'm not out to steal anyone's girlfriend, so why the fuck can't Mister _Confucius Says_ stop with the riddle-me-this _bullshit_ and –"

"Wait, wait, _stop_," McCoy cuts in, looking up at Jim for the first time since he's sat down, his expression vaguely irritated. "Put yer stuff down and sit, why dontya? Yer makin' me nervous."

Jim expels a lengthy sigh as he does what he's told, carefully tossing his backpack onto the coffee table and dropping into the easy chair next to the sofa. He keeps his Sprite, though.

"Start from the beginnin'," Bones instructs him with a small wave of his pen. "And try to make as much sense as possible fer my sake."

So Jim tells McCoy the tale of how he accidentally came to stalk the object of his affections and her not-boyfriend.

"Didja ever think that maybe you could lay off her and she'd stop, I dunno, wantin' to castrate you?" is Bones' first question, asked over the edge of his crossword book and punctuated by the less-than-enthusiastic look on his face, all furrowed brows and unimpressed scowling. Never let it be said that Leonard McCoy is a dishonest man.

"Well, I _have_ laid off her, mostly," Jim immediately replies, just a little defensive. "I mean, the extent of our communication since Monday has been me _smiling_ at her and her glaring back. That's it!"

"Too little, too late, man," McCoy _tsk_s, scribbling in his crossword puzzle and completely ignoring Jim's hangdog frown. He raises one eyebrow without looking at the other, asks, "Who did you say she wasn't datin' again? The android?"

"Yeah, _him_," Jim grumbles, leaning back in his chair and taking a swig of his now-warm soda. "He's this total _freak_ that talks just like he popped out of a fucking _Brontë_ and may or may not have a thirty nine and a half foot pole shoved up his ass."

"_Yer a mean one, Mister Grinch..._" McCoy hums, sing-songy.

"His name is Spock," says Jim. It is almost _comical_ how instantaneously Bones drops his crossword book on the table and whips his head up to look at him, eyes wide and expression inflamed.

"_Spock?_" the man asks, his eyebrows steadily climbing up his forehead. "_The_ Spock?"

Truth be told, the amount of alarm Bones is exhibiting at the moment is _really _troubling Jim (mainly because it's never a good sign when the mere _name_ of the guy you're sort of beefing with incites _that_ sort of reaction in others; that's usually an indicator of something intimidating and scary like excellence or steroids), so his voice comes out a nervous croak when he says, "You _know_ him?"

McCoy snorts loudly in response. "_Do _I?"

According to Bones, Spock is at the top of his class and has consistently _been_ at the top of his class since the first semester of his first year at Starfleet. He supposedly comes from a wealthy family down in New York City, and he is known throughout the majority of the student body for three things:

_**- One**_, that he is almost certainly a genius. There have been rumors circulating since last year that his intelligence quotient surpasses **_170_** (cue an involuntary gasp and a shocked '_no fucking way_' courtesy of Jim).

_**- Two**_, his oddness in general. It's common knowledge around Starfleet that Spock doesn't have the most normal way of speaking or acting, that he might stare a little longer than he should, that nearly **99%** of the time he comes off as nearly robotic in nature. Apparently most people don't think much of that, though, as evidenced by the fact that –

_**- Three**_, _hordes_ and _hordes_ of men and women have been vying for his affections ever since he first hit Starfleet campus, and in all the time he's been here, he's never dated a single one of them, let alone shown them any sort of interest. As a result, not only does he appear to be almost entirely too aloof, but he's something of a heartbreaker as well.

Of course, then McCoy goes on to whinge about how haughty and stuck-up the guy is – "_I bet you a whole lotta money that the reason this guy doesn't date is because he's too busy bein' up his own ass half the time._" – and when Jim asks him if he's ever actually met him, he's met with a resounding '_no_', followed by, "_But his damn reputation speaks loud enough in my opinion, ya hear what I'm sayin'?_"

Jim hears. But it – _all_ of it – doesn't sit quite right in his ears, doesn't quell any of his confusion, doesn't explain if and why Spock is really courting Uhura, and it doesn't make him any less lost than he was before he came running up here. He's getting there, though. At least he's a little less anxious about it all.

After about **ten minutes **of sitting quietly, pensively, in his chair and watching McCoy continue to work on his crossword puzzle, Jim springs to his feet and starts heading for his bedroom, backpack in hand. Before he's even halfway across the living room, he remembers himself and turns back to his roommate, asks, "Where's the directory?"

"Sulu put it on the counter by the fridge," Bones replies, growling briefly at his crossword after he's spoken.

Jim alters his trajectory to retrieve the student directory from the kitchen, momentarily tripping over a stray article of clothing on the floor on his way there. It's then when he first realizes that neither Sulu or Chekov have wandered through the apartment the entire time he's been here.

"Where's Sulu and the Russian?" he asks as he's flipping through the directory, scanning the pages for names beginning with _U_.

It takes McCoy about a second and a half to answer him. "Out." Several more moments of silence. "Tryin'a hoard orange juice from the cafeteria."

Jim chuckles, amused, as he exits the kitchen and makes a beeline for his original destination. "I'm gonna make a phone call, okay?" he announces a moment before he's moving to kick his door closed behind him, but McCoy stops him with a semi-urgent,

"Wait!" Jim pauses, right foot still poised six inches off the ground. "_Where Charon carries on_, four letters."

"Styx," Jim replies without more than an instant of thought. He shuts the door on McCoy's irritated echo – "_Styx!_" – and transfers his full attention to digging his cellphone out of his backpack and the name resting beneath his thumb – _Uhura, Nyota_.

_**One**_, **_two_**, _**three**_, **_four_** rings before she picks up. "Hello?" Her voice sounds an octave deeper on the phone.

"Uhura?" Jim asks, just to clarify that it's her.

"Who is this?" she shoots back instead of answering. There's a bit of movement over the line.

Jim leans back against his headboard, shrugging lightly and making a sheepish face at no one in particular as he prepares himself for the dial tone. "I'll give you three guesses."

A beat. "I don't have time to play games with you, whoever you a–"

"It's me!" he crows with a nervous laugh. "Your friendly neighborhood self-absorbed asshole."

It doesn't take her very long to catch on. "Oh, _god_," she groans, immediately exasperated. Jim hears what sounds like a door slamming in the background. "How the hell did you get my number?"

"Student directory," he replies, idly flipping through the pages of the book in question without looking for anything specific. Not thinking, he adds, "You mind if I save it?"

"I'm going to hang up now," Uhura says, effectively reminding him of the sheer mortality of this phone call.

"Wait, _listen!_" Jim scrambles, dropping the directory onto the floor and instinctively straightening his back. He runs a hand through his brush of sandy hair, out of his element. "I... I wanted to apologize."

_Yes_, my friends. The reason why Jim Kirk has endeavored to contact Ms. Uhura is because he, for the first time in the entirety of his _life_, felt the need to apologize for his wrongdoings. Let's just say that something in McCoy's profound disapproval of his methods of courtship really inspired him.

There's a somewhat lengthy, terrifying moment of silence that hangs between them, then. Jim holds his breath, gazing deeply into the eyes of Kurt Cobain as he stares out at him from the poster on his wall. While he waits for a reply, a little ditty starts composing itself in his mind – "_When I find myself in times of trouble, Kurt Cobain comes to me, speaking words of wisdom..._"

"Thanks but no thanks, jackass," Uhura eventually says, unintentionally finishing the verse. Jim sighs.

"Look, I know I haven't exactly been a _white knight_ to you –"

"Is that some kind of jab at our ethnicities?"

"But shouldn't it count at least a little that I'm saying sorry?"

"Do you even know what you're apologizing for?" Uhura asks, and for the record, it's actually quite shocking that she's _still_ on the phone with Jim after so long. He expected her to have hung up on him like **fifty seconds** ago, and this conversation is only about **a minute** old to begin with.

"Well, uh..." Now is when Jim starts to fumble a bit. He only rehearsed this exchange up until the initial apology, and that's mainly because _**one**_ – he's not a big fan of forethought, and **_two_** – he was pretty sure his douchebaggery was self-explanatory at this point. But because he's a hard worker by nature and he's supposed to be good at this whole talking thing, or whatever, it's only a second before he recovers with, "I've been a total jerk to you, haven't I?" As if he didn't already know that.

"You have," Uhura agrees. There's some more rustling over the line, then, "Are you telling me this because you're actually sorry or just because you think it'll make you look better to me?"

Jim hesitates, sensing a trap, carefully considering his answer. "... both?"

There shouldn't be anything wrong with a little kissing up, should there? And she can't knock him for his honesty, right? _Right?_

Apparently she can, because _instantly_, she's shutting him down with a, "_Bye_, Kirk," and hanging up on his ass without any further ado. Jim is left alone with the dial tone, Mr. Cobain, and the small thrill of having his name said for the very first time by Uhura (not that _jackass_ and _asshole_ didn't do it for him, either).

For maybe** two and a half minutes**, Jim remains propped up against his headboard, lazily twirling his phone in his lap and listening to the muted sounds of rap music playing in the apartment below and several female students laughing on the sidewalk outside. He sits there and slowly convinces himself that he's not that let down, that his feelings aren't all that hurt, and _yeah_, that he deserved what he got, didn't he?

Really, it's not about being rejected anymore. He's pretty much past that, thanks to Spock's existence, his conversation with McCoy, and his own common sense. It's more that he's blown his chances at achieving anything close to a relationship of any kind with Uhura that bothers him, and there's almost _nothing_ Jim Kirk hates more in the world than wasted opportunities.

There's also the fact that he's actually starting to think Uhura is, dare he say it, kind of fucking _mean_. Not because she's independent. Not because she stands up for herself. What gets him is her absolute, unwavering certainty that she has him all figured out even though the extent of their communication is limited, at best. And how exactly did she come to the conclusion that Spock is so much better than he is after like, not even **a ****_day_** of knowing _both_ of them? And did he really _ever_ have a chance with her after he spilled, what, _**an ounce**_ of coffee on her? Did she even give him one to begin with?

Jim is contemplating this and whether or not he should take a shower, get in his pajamas, eat some junk food, and play _Mass Effect_ for the rest of the afternoon and evening when the sound of the front door opening and closing and Sulu, Chekov, and McCoy's voices snap him out of his reverie. He tosses his cellphone to the side and makes for the living room, where he finds McCoy and Sulu engaged in some sort of discussion and Chekov rummaging around in his messenger bag, which, upon closer inspection, is nearly overflowing with **ten ounce** bottles of Tropicana. Jim lets himself have a laugh at that.

"You know how them Greeks are, though," is what McCoy is saying when Jim tunes in to he and Sulu's conversation. "Bunch'a pompous assholes if you ask me."

"Bones, you think _everyone's_ a pompous asshole," Jim points out as he drops down next to the man on the sofa. He gets a quick glare in response.

"It's not like everyone there is going to be a Greek, though," Sulu says, moving to sit in the easy chair Jim was occupying earlier. Chekov passes behind the sofa and into the kitchen as the man goes on, "They pretty much said that anyone was invited."

"Invited to what?" Jim pipes in, his interest piqued. Suddenly, the remainder of his evening isn't looking too shabby.

"Oh!" Sulu emits a nervous little chuckle and slaps his knee as if to reprimand himself – an action Jim can't help but smile at. "I was just telling McCoy about how Chekov and I ran into these Greeks in the caf who were handing out invitations to this party they're having tonight."

"Well, if they're just arbitrarily handing out invites to everyone they can't be _that_ elitist, can they?" Jim aims the question at Bones, who has defiantly turned back to his crossword puzzle and is scribbling in a word almost _furiously_ at the moment.

Sulu grins exultantly, briefly raising a hand to Jim and crowing, "What _he_ said!" Jim gifts him with a short little bow of the head.

McCoy's scowl deepens incrementally in response. Instead of dignifying either of them with a direct reply, he says, "_Japanese earthquake city of 1995_, four letters."

Sulu shakes his head at Jim for a moment, a look of feigned hurt upon his face, and sighs, "It's because I'm a Jap, isn't it?" Jim just about _blows a fucking lung out_ laughing as the man turns to McCoy and says, "_Kobe_, K-o-b-e. Do we get to party because I helped you?"

"_Dancer Tallchief_, five letters," is Bones' stiff-lipped answer.

"Maria!" Chekov supplies, returning from the kitchen and presently free of any extra orange juice. Jim composes himself just enough to scoot over and give the teenager some room to sit down on his other side. Chekov gives him a gleeful smile for his trouble.

And then, because he actually _does_ want to go to this party more than he wants to breathe, Jim struggles through his laughter to say, "Oh... come on, Bones..." He snickers into his hand. "Doesn't the promise of booze call to you?"

"_Ah_, the booze..." Sulu hums in accord.

"Glorious showers of _booze_," Jim goes on, spreading his arms for emphasis and grinning when Chekov laughs at the display. "What do they say about going to college parties?"

"Upon entry, they will lay you upon their leather couches smelling of sweat and sex and you will be rewarded with seventy-two untouched red Solo cups filled to the brim with the finest of all liquors." Sulu pauses dramatically. "_Heineken_."

You hear that, that ugly, hysterical howling noise? That would be Jim breathing his last on his journey from the land of the living. Oh _God_, he's almost peeing.

"Speaking of which, how do you think they acquire so much alcohol?" Sulu asks, watching McCoy's face intently as the man makes a valiant, yet failing, attempt not to end up like Jim. "I mean, that's a _lot_ of booze to go out and buy, especially considering that nearly half the student body is going to be there..."

"Do you zink Ms. Chapel vill be zere?" Chekov puts in, openly referring to McCoy's not-so-secret infatuation for one of his fellow medical students.

Immediately, Bones is lowering his crossword and shooting both Chekov and Sulu pointed, defensive looks, saying, "Christine doesn't do parties, alright?"

"You never know, man," Jim manages through the small seizures of laughter still racking his body, slouching deeply against the sofa at this point. "This one could be the turning point for her."

Sulu nods his agreement. "And you'd never even know if you didn't go."

"You should call her and invite her," Jim suggests. "I promise I'll sleep on the couch if you get lucky."

Bones whacks Jim in the stomach with his crossword book, shaking his head in affectionate exasperation as the man simply purrs in response and Sulu and Chekov chuckle at the exchange. "Why d'you guys even want me to go to this damn thing so bad?" he asks.

He gets three answers, all spoken at the exact same time, right on top of the other:

"Because it vill be fun!" That's Chekov.

"Because you need to get your soggy ass out of this apartment." That's Sulu.

"Because we love you, y'old sawbones." And that's Jim.

Jim smiles up at the look of tender bemusement McCoy gives him, shows him all **thirty-two** of his teeth and scrunches his nose up and makes his eyes small and squinty and adorable. They all know he hasn't told a lie.

After a prolonged moment of silence, Bones lets out a lengthy sigh, drops his crossword book onto the coffee table, gets to his feet, and walks all the way across the living room, **six** curious pairs of eyes following him all the while.

It's only when the man reaches his bedroom door that he says, "So we'll go the goddamn party, yeah?"

Jim and Sulu explode into a melodramatic fit of cheers and rejoicing, leap about six feet out of their seats, and meet each other over the coffee table in a noisy, _violent_ high-five. They then proceed to dance around the living room, with Sulu breaking out into full _air-guitar_ mode and Jim grabbing up a giggling, bewildered Chekov from the sofa to sloppily waltz him across the floor.

It's safe to say that they're pleased with this outcome. Meanwhile, McCoy is rolling his eyes so hard they're nearly falling right out of his head.

The next **hour and a half** is spent getting ready for the party, and by _getting ready_, I mean Jim, Sulu, and Chekov nosily sitting in on McCoy's phone call with Miss Christine Chapel for about** fifteen minutes**, the **four** of them arguing over the shower for **ten**, Chekov brushing his teeth in the kitchen sink while Bones mans the bathroom (mostly due to the fact that '_he's the one who's definitely getting laid tonight_,' as stated by Jim), some panicked searching for the invitation (which Sulu misplaced at some point between walking in the door and doing his victory dance with Jim), and, of course, the actual things _getting ready_ entails, like the changing of clothes and the applying of deodorant and the grooming of persons. As it turns out, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov are the ones who actually do any cleaning up; Jim mostly just runs a hand through his hair, says "_fuck it_," and sits in the corner of his room playing _Temple Run_ on his phone while playfully criticizing McCoy's sense of fashion – "_I hope Chapel has as much of a boner for your cowboy boots as you do_," and "_Did you tell her to look for your belt buckle when she gets there? Because you could see that sucker from space, man._"

They take Sulu's car – a fairly old Trailblazer – to the Greek house just outside of Starfleet campus. Jim is more than determined to call shotgun until Chekov turns to them all and asks for their permission to sit there – "_If it isn't too much to ask_," he says – and the kid is too polite and adorable and eager for Jim to deny him the privilege. He takes the backseat with McCoy and pokes fun at his clothing some more.

Just as they're exiting Starfleet campus, Chekov announces to the whole car that, "I have never been to a party before," effectively bringing about one huge collective gasp among the roommates.

"Are you serious?" Jim blurts without realizing how rude the question might sound until it's already out of him.

Thankfully, Chekov doesn't seem to take any offense, and his reply is a completely genuine, almost alarmed, "Like a heart attack!"

"_As_ a heart attack," Sulu corrects him. He reaches across the center console to give Chekov's knee a brief, reassuring pat. "Nice try, though."

Meanwhile, Jim is having a minor freak-out in the backseat. "We can't let him go off into the wild unprepared and uneducated."

"Unprepared?" Chekov echoes, a note of fear in his voice.

"Don't mix your drinks no matter what McCoy might tell you," Jim says, laughing when said man cracks a hand against his shoulder.

"Don't put yer drink down, either," McCoy adds. "That's just askin' fer trouble,"

"Try to drink a lot of water so you don't end up with the worst hangover of all time tomorrow," Jim puts in.

"Don't do anythin' you wouldn't want people to remember you for," McCoy says.

"Did you eat anything before we left?" Jim asks.

Before Chekov can even _begin_ to answer, McCoy is saying, "Tell me yer not wearin' sandals."

"You guys, _come on_," Sulu interrupts, shushing Jim and McCoy with a beseeching wave of the hand with consideration to the look of absolute terror on Chekov's face. "I'll stick with you the whole time, okay? Don't worry about it."

Chekov shifts uncomfortably in his seat, the anxiety apparent in his expression lightening only just slightly. "Okay..." he whimpers, plaintive and apprehensive. Sulu pinches his cheek in response.

Ever a perceptive one, Jim snorts from the backseat and lets out a whispered, intentionally audible, "_Gay_." McCoy takes that as his cue to hit him again.

When they get to the party, students are pouring out of every doorway and a Beastie Boys album is booming from two gargantuan speakers in the living room. The air is thick with the smell of alcohol, cigarette smoke, and human sweat, and Jim can't turn anywhere without finding a hand on his ass or nearly tripping over someone's feet or trying not to get a mouthful of a stranger's hair or getting a deep whiff of body odor. They're only six feet into the house before it looks like Chekov is going to have a panic attack, McCoy is yelling over the din that he's '_goin' to look fer Christine, okay?!_', Sulu is wrapping an arm tight around Chekov's shoulders, and Jim is drunk simply by proxy.

Plainly put, it's the craziest party Jim has ever been to, and they've only been there for about **forty-fiveseconds**.

Immediately after McCoy has disappeared, Jim, Sulu, and Chekov agree to stay close and rendezvous in the backyard in **three hours** just in case they lose each other. Sulu and Chekov then proceed to navigate the crowd, looking for a pocket of relatively clean air and a slightly lower concentration of people, while Jim makes it his mission in life to find some booze and get some drinks for his friends and for himself (mostly himself).

And for the first **hour and a half **or so, they actually have a lot of fun, considering the sheer amount of people in the house and the fact that for about **thirty minutes**, Chekov is the human equivalent of a newborn kitten, all overwhelmed and bewildered and helpless and possibly blind. Once Jim and Sulu manage to get a drink or two in him, though, it's smooth sailing from then on out, and the party quickly becomes a blur of strobe lights, wanton screaming, body heat, and random girls cooing all over Chekov. They pass their time mingling with the party goers, casually searching for McCoy, drinking way too much jungle juice, and laughing at each other's ridiculous attempts at dancing. Sulu turns out to be the only one of them who's actually proficient at such an activity, seeing as he took hip hop and swing classes in his adolescence, while Chekov just kind of awkwardly pushes his butt around and flaps his arms a bit and Jim threatens to kills Sulu with his white boy butterfly/two-step combination.

"Why don't _you_ teach me how it's done, then, Fred Astaire?" Jim teases him, playfully shoving a hand against his shoulder and accidentally spilling a few ounces of jungle juice onto his shirt (he's really good at getting beverages on people if you couldn't tell). Keep in mind that everyone is screaming just to be heard over each other and the music.

Sulu just continues to laugh into his Solo cup, says, "I might have to before you make me choke on my drink and _die_ right in the middle of this party."

Jim is prepared to say something back to him when Chekov starts patting his arm almost frantically, pointing into the crowd and crying, "Look! It's Ms. Uhura!"

Sure enough, there she is straight ahead of him, helping herself to a drink at a table near the kitchen and engaged in conversation with a female student Jim's never seen before. She's wearing a sleeveless, wine-colored party dress that only just brushes her knees and, as a result, looks especially, _dangerously _beautiful. Jim is suddenly reminded of the exact moment in which she hung up on him earlier today.

"Oh my God, _that's_ the girl you've been trying to butter up?" Sulu gasps, and when Jim turns to him, he's shooting him a look of pleasured surprise and saying, "I _work_ with that chick at the restaurant."

"Are you joking?" Jim asks, staring at Sulu as if the man has slapped him.

"Not even for a second," Sulu replies, taking a sip of his jungle juice. He makes this soft, giggling sort of noise. "_Man_, I actually feel kind of sorry for you now. She's tough as nails."

"'Tough as nails'?" Chekov asks, watching Sulu inquisitively. Sulu grins.

"It's an expression," he clarifies. "It means she's really fierce."

It's at around that time that Jim stops listening to them and starts making his way through the crowd in pursuit of her. He's not entirely sure why he's going to talk to her or even what he's going to say when he does, but he keeps getting hit with that stupid, almost gut-wrenching hung-up-on feeling with every step he takes toward her, and that's what keeps him from turning his ass around and going back to Sulu and Chekov, where he's comfortable and happy and not in danger of getting a drink thrown in his face.

"You know, it's really impolite to hang up on someone," is what ends up coming out of his mouth when he reaches her, unrehearsed and thoughtless.

Uhura turns away from the girl she's talking with to look at him, and for what feels like the thousandth time this week, Jim is hit with the look of unimpressed, exasperated recognition that crosses her face every time she sees him. It still stings, believe it or not.

"It's also really impolite to interrupt conversations and relentlessly hit on a girl long after she asks you to stop," Uhura retorts with a smile of feigned pleasantry, a smile that twists something nasty in Jim's core.

"I tried to apologize to you, but..." Jim gives her a shrug and an insincere, bitter little smirk. "You know how well that went."

Uhura narrows her eyes at him a moment before her friend is passing her a quick, "_I guess I'll talk to you later, okay?_" and disappearing into the throng of partygoers. Her ire only seems to intensify as she watches her go, and when she looks back to Jim, she's snapping, "_Great_, now you're driving off my friends."

"I guess I'm just not that good for you, huh?" Jim says, simply smiling in response to the glare she aims at him.

"It's nice to see that you're finally catching on," Uhura replies. Jim sobers pretty fast at that.

"Look," he says, drunk on the supremely negative energy this conversation has suddenly taken on and the relative lack of space between them. "I apologized to you. I haven't come on to you or even really _talked_ to you since that day in the library. Why are you still so hellbent on hating me?"

Uhura gives him this look that's half-smirking and half-sneering, full of amusement and disbelief and scorn all at the same time, and her voice is high and incredulous over the din of the party when she says, "You actually think that just apologizing is enough. That I'm going to just up and forgive you just because you want me to." She cocks her head to the side, slaps him in the face with another one of her awful fake smiles. "Uh, _reality check_ – I'm not that kind of girl, and you're going to have to work a _little_ bit harder than that."

She starts to walk away, then, push on past him (i.e.: basically rub all the way against him on her way away from him, seeing as they're cramped into such a tight space and surrounded by at least twenty people on all sides) to move into the crowd, and at first, Jim is okay with swallowing the apparent unfairness of her judgment and letting her go on her merry way – it's a party, after all, and they both came here to have fun, right? – but then she throws him a parting comment so _biting_ he can actually feel it clip him in the jaw as it sails past him:

"Like you even _deserve_ my forgiveness."

And something clicks inside of Jim, then, something hard and angry and almost as old as he is, something he tends to associate with Sam and Riverside and principal's offices and his stepfather, something that's sent him running away from home – running _here_, in fact – numerous times in his life, and suddenly, it doesn't matter that she's beautiful or that she's a woman or that he's attracted to her or that he actually happens to admire everything about her (save for her double standards, that is), and it doesn't matter that they're at a party and that anyone could be listening to their conversation ("_Don't do anythin' you wouldn't want people to remember you for._"), and it doesn't matter that Jim is supposed to have a heart of gold or be a good guy (or at least, that's what he's always been told to be) – he doesn't stop himself from calling after her, barking at the back of her head, "Hey, how can you even say something like that? You don't even know who I am."

Uhura stops in her tracks almost instantly, turning around to face him again, and her expression has retained all of the venom and none of the fabricated pleasure it had seconds before and her eyes are sharp and critical and full of surprise and the fire so familiar to them when she asks, "Oh, really?"

Jim doesn't flinch when she gets back in his face, actually relishes in the waves of anger radiating off of her, but that sick kink of delight all but flies out the window when she looks him dead in the face and says, "I know _exactly_ who you are, Jim Kirk, because I've played with guys just as selfish," – she grinds the word out – "_arrogant_," – harder – "_inconsiderate_," – harder _still_ – "and _**immature**_," – it hits him directly between the eyes, slashes a cruel line right down the center of his face – "as _you_ my whole life."

There's a moment after that's out in the air where neither of them say anything, just stare at each other with varying shades of anger in the dim light of the party. Uhura is obviously incensed. Jim is seriously fighting the urge to punch her directly in the mouth.

And then, as if to punctuate her previous statement or maybe even capitalize on the hurt fresh in Jim's eyes, Uhura adds, "So, _no_ – you _don't_ deserve my forgiveness."

That is the instant in which Jim becomes acutely aware of how hot he feels and how his blood seems to be boiling and how his heart has sped up and his breath is coming to him faster, and the maroon of Uhura's dress looks especially red right now and the music booming in his ears is ten times louder than it truly is and the people around him are suffocatingly close and there's something coiling up tight and painful in his center and _yes_, if you're wondering if Jim Kirk has become so angry that he's actually having an anxiety attack right where he's standing, you are absolutely correct and you should give yourself a great big pat on the back for me.

Remember what I said earlier about how (not) wonderful Jim is with inadequacy and being undervalued and dismissed? That's _really_ coming into play right about now.

The voice that rips out of Jim is harsh and low when he snarls, "You know, I can put up with a lot of shit – and I _have_ put up with a lot of shit, not that you'd care about my sad, sorry life," – Uhura winces at that – "but I'm _not_ gonna stand for some person who _doesn't even know me_ telling me who I am and what I do and don't deserve."

For a moment, Uhura actually looks a little guilty, but it's only a second before any phantom trace of remorse in her expression disappears and she begins to retort, "You've _shown_ me who you are–"

"Oh _yeah_, by oh-so _inconsiderately_ trying to _get to know you_ just like any smart person with eyes would – as if that's such a _fucking_ crime – while you throw yourself all over an undateable guy." Because Jim is the best at mixing shit-talking with telling the truth. Also, might I draw your attention to the look of utter dismay that has slapped itself across Uhura's face?

Then, out of absolutely fucking _nowhere_, this huge, beefy guy is shoving his way between Jim and Uhura – who have ended up nearly pressed against each other in the heat of their argument – and spraying Jim in the face with a mouthful of saliva as he barks, "Hey, back the fuck up, asshole!" In Jim's breathtaking shock and rage, he can only watch as the ape turns to Uhura and asks her, "Is this kid bothering you?"

Uhura's slightly uncertain, "I'm fine, thanks," flies right over Jim's head as he takes in the circle of spectators that have surrounded them, all wide-eyed and excited and staring at him with such alarm, and in that moment, he realizes that he has become _that jackass_ in the eyes of everyone present – that jackass who just happens to argue with a girl in public and is automatically a horrible person as a result – and wouldn't it be a fucking _miracle_ if he didn't spontaneously combust right the _fuck now –_

"Who the fuck're you calling '_kid_'?" Jim spits at the ape, full of vitriol and acid and the dangerous sort of reckless abandon that comes with being _insanely _pissed off.

The asshole turns to him slowly, deliberately taking his time to raise himself up to his full height and give him a thorough once-over – an intimidation tactic that does absolutely _nothing_ for Jim – and says, "You, _kid_." He sneers at him. "What, are you stupid or somethin'?"

There isn't a pragmatic, pacifistic, or otherwise logical thought in Jim's mind when he gives the guy a toothy, openmouthed grin and replies, without a single drop of hesitation or forethought, "You know, I'm actually starting to feel like I am, considering that the collective IQ of everyone in a given area seems to drop once you're in it, you fucking _mongoloid_."

And that, my friends, is how Jim Kirk ends up sprawled across the drinks table, half-covered in jungle juice, possibly sporting a broken nose, and nearly deafened by the frenzied screaming of every human being within a **twenty-foot** radius. It takes maybe **a second and a half** for him to realize that he's been punched rather forcefully in the face, and in just as much time, his attacker is dragging him up onto the very tips of his toes and slugging him again, right in the jaw, then once more in his nose, then in his eye and against his temple and across his chin, over and over and _over_ again.

And _yeah_, he fights back as best as he can. He actually succeeds at getting a few punches in. For the most part, though, Jim gets his ass handed to him on a silver platter in full view of about a quarter of the student body, and that's mainly because his opponent has **six inches** and **five times** as many **pounds** on him, not to mention the fact that he caught him _way_ off guard with his initial punch.

At one point, right after taking a particularly brutal blow to the stomach and managing to smash his fist against the asshole's nose (a punch that results in an extremely painful-sounding, extremely satisfying _crunch_, might I add), Jim Kirk hears a name slice through the riotous uproar as he lays battered on the floor, struggling for breath:

"_Nyota!_"

It's clear as a bell when it goes ringing through the cacophony, the loudest sound in the room for all of **three milliseconds**, and it's just as articulate and baseline and atonal as can be, but there's _alarm_ there – Jim can hear it plain as day.

And in the moment only seconds before the ape kicking his ass from here to next year realizes, with an outburst of explosive proportions, that Jim brokehis'_motherfucking nose!_', Jim catches a glimpse of Uhura through the crowd, a pale hand clutching her caramel arm, and he follows that hand and finds Spock wrapping a protective arm around her shoulders, shielding her from the violence and the commotion and trying to pull her away from it all as quickly as possible. For an instant Jim is almost entirely sure he's imagining, they lock eyes from across the sea of people, and he has blood dripping into his mouth and it feels like the whole world is standing between them and Spock's gaze is darker than the starless night, but it's leaving Jim too quickly and the wind is being knocked out of him with a swift kick to the gut courtesy of Mr. Asshole himself before he can even begin to wonder why he misses it so much.

The side of his head is getting bashed into the ground when another familiar voice breaks through the chaos, growling, "_Get him off of him!_"

And then another – "_Stop! You're killing him!_"

In all actuality, Jim has been much closer to death on several different occasions and felt lightyears worse than he does right now (mostly because he's got so much adrenaline flooding his veins at the moment that he actually can't feel the trauma his body is taking), but he truly appreciates Sulu's concern on the basis of the fact that it will more than likely save his life anyway.

Suddenly, the fists pummeling into him disappear and McCoy is hauling him to his feet by his armpits, grabbing him around his waist and positioning one of his limp arms about his shoulders. The second Jim is upright, the room starts steadily spinning and he can't see anything worth a damn and his head begins to throb and he has this sudden urge to _vomit_, and he knows McCoy is shouting something but he doesn't know whether or not he's shouting it at him, and Sulu is somewhere around here being helpful like he always is, and Chekov is fucking _nowhere_ to be seen (and that just so happens to be at the very top of Jim's list of Extremely Bad Things That Could Happen Tonight), and _shit_, that was a pint of blood that just came spilling out of his nose, wasn't it?

Somehow, Bones manages to single-handedly beat a path through the screaming crowd and get them to a bathroom. As soon as they're in there, Jim is, quite stupidly, tearing himself away from his friend and going stumbling to the floor, where he frantically drags himself a short **two feet** across the tile and to the toilet. He gets there just in time to empty the contents of his stomach (which pretty much only consist of alcohol) and, by sheer force of gravity, a good bit of the blood dripping from his nose into the bowl.

Bones lets out a long, exasperated sigh from somewhere above Jim as he carefully lays his forehead against the toilet seat and makes a valiant attempt to catch his breath. He slowly becomes more and more aware of that thing that is his body – the godawful pounding of his head, the tenderness around his left eye, the soreness of his nose and the pain in his jaw and the ache in his abdomen and how his hands are shaking and his back stings all over, and in a place hovering around the forefront of his mind, he knows that McCoy has to be really, _really_ pissed off right now, so he isn't all that surprised when the man's voice explodes into the air of the room, bellowing,

"What the _fuck_ happened out there?!" He's still standing over Jim.

Jim raises his head to peer up at his friend; he ends up seeing two of him. "Well, I kind of got my ass kicked," is his breathless reply.

Bones snorts loudly. "No _shit_, huh?" The man bends at the waist to drag Jim off of the floor again, snapping, "Up, _up!_ So I can make sure yer not gonna start _seizing_ or anythin'."

Jim is weak and uncoordinated as McCoy heaves him over and onto the counter by the sink, boneless when the man pushes him up against the mirror behind him. It's then when he notices Sulu and (thank _God_) Chekov standing by the door, watching him with expressions of anxiety and terror, respectively. He gives the latter of them a quick, painful smile and a wink in a somewhat feeble attempt to ease his distress. Chekov only blinks in response.

"One of you get me a wad of toilet paper and a washcloth if you can find one, please," Bones orders, all but hurling the words over his shoulder as he reaches for Jim's face. "And put a chai– _stop moving_, you _infant_ – put a chair under that doorknob."

Jim flinches in pain when McCoy's fingers frame the bridge of his nose, feeling along the bones there, but he forces himself to obediently remain still as the man carefully searches for any fractures. Chekov momentarily appears to give Bones the toilet tissue and the towel he asked for, but as soon as the man instructs him to '_just leave it on the counter_', the teenager does just that and then quickly vanishes from view to scuttle on back to Sulu, obviously shaken. Jim fights the urge to sniff.

"Well, yer nose ain't broken," Bones huffs, releasing his face and turning away to run the washcloth under the tap. "How d'you feel?"

Jim inhales as sharply as he can, thoughtlessly trying to rid his nasal passages of the blood clogging them. "Shitty, wouldn't you think?"

Bones makes an irritated noise in the back of his throat and grabs Jim again, this time by the jaw, to start wiping the gore from his face. "I'm gonna need you to be a little more specific, Jim," he retorts, dabbing roughly at the space beneath his nose.

Jim starts to let out an irritable sigh, but quickly stops himself after Bones squeezes down on his sore jaw and gives him an incredibly incensed glare (and for the record, this might be the angriest Jim has ever seen the man, and McCoy is _always_ pissed off). His voice is half-muffled in the washcloth as he replies, "I'm kinda dizzy, everything hurts, and I think my head is about to split open." He sniffs a little. "Like a watermelon."

"You probably have a concussion," McCoy notes. He tosses the bloody towel into the sink and makes to rip two sheets of toilet paper off of the wad Chekov brought him, peering carefully at Jim's left eye. "And that's more than likely gonna be purple as a plum tomorrow mornin'."

Jim turns to regard his reflection in the mirror. There is still some blood dripping from his nose and caked in his nostrils, the right side of his bottom lip is splitting, and his jaw and his eye (_especially_ his eye) are visibly bruising. All in all, it isn't the worst abuse his face has been dealt.

"Can't fuckin' wait," he chuckles just as Bones takes his face a third time and forces him to look at him, then promptly shoves a twisted stump of toilet tissue into each of his nostrils. He thanks the man with a warm, silly smile; in return, he gets one of McCoy's trademark heavy eye-rolls.

"Care to tell me how you ended up gettin' yer ass busted?" McCoy asks as he moves to wash his hands of Jim's blood. "Or am I gonna have to use my imagination?"

Any pretense of a good mood Jim might have had evaporates at the question and is quickly replaced with the residual anger he's always left with after he exists for a little while. He lowers his eyes to his hands, which are slightly bloody and bruised themselves. "You'll just get pissed off."

"Have you been payin' attention? I think we've already reached that section of the program," Bones says. His voice softens a bit as he goes on, "Start from the beginnin'. Make sense."

And because Jim actually does think McCoy ought to know why he was forced to peel him off of the floor and clean him up in some random person's bathroom, he tells him. Of course, he gets the full brunt of the man's criticism when he does.

"Fighting with the girl you're tryin'a start a relationship with," McCoy puts in after Jim has finished his story, giving him a mocking, sarcastic _okay_ sign with his right hand. "Real _nice_, Jim. Yer really givin' Spock a run for his money."

At the same time that Sulu is asking, "Who's Spock?", Jim is grumbling, "I don't want to start a relationship with her anymore." They both share a brief, apologetic look for having spoken over each other.

Bones gives Sulu a small nod and a quick, "I'll tell you later," before turning back to Jim and asking, "Did you come to this conclusion _before_ or _after_ you had an argument with her in front of half the damn school?"

"Before," is Jim's reflexive answer, but after it leaves him, he's not entirely certain of the truth in it. "No, after. _No_ – before." He lets out a frustrated sigh, gives McCoy a helpless, beseeching look. "I dunno, Bones, is it really that important?"

"_Yeah_, it is!" McCoy retorts, assailing Jim with one of the harshest of his judgmental glares. "I'd honestly like to know why in the world it was _so_ imperative that you, what, _defend your honor_ to a girl that doesn't even matter to you."

"She _does_ matter to me!" Jim snaps, and even though he never consciously realized it before now (not to mention the fact that he doesn't quite understand the nature of his feelings yet), he knows he isn't lying. He runs his hands through the unkempt mess of his hair, rough and exasperated and maybe even a little desperate. "_Gosh_, can't you just– stop being so fucking _critical_ for at least two fucking minutes?"

Bones' glower softens incrementally, but the expression on his face tells Jim that the answer to his question is one great big, angry ass '_no_'. It's not like he expected otherwise, really.

Almost as if to give Jim a little reprieve, Sulu pipes in from where he's still lingering by the door. "What did you call the guy again?"

Jim deflates against the mirror, exhaling heavily. His voice is a note softer than it is normally when he says, "A mongoloid."

Sulu gives a long, low whistle. "That's really bad, man."

"That was the intention," Jim points out. Bones _tsks_ loudly.

"You know, I was actually having a really good time with Christine, just like you told me to." McCoy crosses his arms over his chest, shakes his head in a supremely disappointed fashion. "Then I had to come save your ass."

That – the words, the tone of voice in which McCoy said them, the fact that the man said them to him at all, everything – twists something awful inside of Jim, the same old something Uhura grabbed a hold of and pretty much _ruined_ earlier, the something that tells him every day in some form or another that _he doesn't deserve_, but instead of getting _mad_ angry like he did before, Jim just gets really tired. He was already pretty close to being there anyway.

He hasn't the self-control or the willpower to stop the stream of words that come spilling forth from his mouth, then, uncontrolled and bitter absolutely _exhausted_ – "Yeah, yeah, I know, I get it. I fucked up like the selfish, inconsiderate, immature piece of shit I am." He sniffs around the toilet tissue in his nose. "I mean, how much more disgusting could I be, right. Right."

Jim Kirk has never been one for self-loathing or insecurity or even shame, but he has been beaten down – both physically and emotionally – in one of the most humiliating ways possible in front of a quarter of the student body, his entire _being_ feels like one gigantic bruise, he has _toilet paper_ hanging out of his nostrils, Chekov is seriously looking like he might start crying at any second, and Bones just kind of broke his heart a little. Everyone has their moments, right?

For several lengthy, unbearable seconds, nobody speaks. Jim stares vacantly at the space between his knees while McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov all stare at him, uncertain and frightened and uncomfortable and guilty. He realizes with a twinge of some unidentifiable emotion between irritation and insight that in saying what he just did, he became the first member of this collective friendship to drop an awkward personal bombshell. How everyone else will react to such a bombshell will define their relationship for the remainder of its lifespan, however long that may be.

After what seems like a year and a half, McCoy finally speaks up.

"Oh, shut up," he says, grumbling. "You should know by now that self-pity doesn't suit you."

The words themselves are harsh, biting, but Bones says them like he's saying sorry, so Jim doesn't really mind.

And several minutes later, when they're walking back to Sulu's car in the dark heat of the late summer night, Chekov falls back to tread beside Jim and says, very softly and without looking at him, "I do not zink you are disgusting." And Jim smiles at him so sweetly he can feel it in his cheeks the entire way home.

Sulu gets him a bowl of rocky road and a homemade ice pack after they've gotten back to the apartment, carefully places the former in Jim's lap and the latter on his head where he lays stretched out on the couch. Bones forces him to take three Tylenol and keep his head elevated. All three of them stay up with him long after they really need to, watching episode after episode of _Cold Case_ and _House_ until they've all fallen asleep, McCoy with Jim's feet in his lap and Sulu and Chekov half-tangled together in the armchair adjacent to the sofa.

_Yes_, Jim thinks he isn't worthy of them for all of their effortless support and their stellar senses of humor and their well-intentioned criticism and their general magnificence. But he'd be damned if he didn't hope they could all last for as long as possible. He is pretty needy, after all.

* * *

**Monday, August 19****th****, 2013 – Saturday, August 31****st****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk's eye is the color of an eggplant when he walks into English on **Monday** morning. The bruise on his jaw is a lighter hue, closer to mauve or amethyst, and ringed with a champagne yellow halo tainted with tiny touches of green. It is still fairly painful for him to exist in a physical sense.

For the first time in the history of this class, Jim doesn't spare Uhura even a glance, just finds his seat with Chekov, removes his laptop from his backpack, and leans back in his seat while he waits for instruction to begin. He's been tonguing at the cut on his lip for about **five minutes** when Chekov tugs lightly on the sleeve of his Henley and whispers,

"Ms. Uhura is looking at you."

Jim's first instinct is to return her gaze, but he stops himself mid-glimpse and redirects his attention to his laptop monitor, a master of self-control for all of **three seconds**. "I'm pretty sure _everyone _is, Ruski. I mean, would you take look at this eye?" He points at it with his thumb for emphasis.

Chekov makes a noise that isn't quite laughter but still captures the basic gist of such a noise. Jim thinks he might die of adorable when the kid kisses his index and middle finger and gently presses it to the tender, bruised skin lining his eye socket.

And for the remainder of the class period, Jim continues to pointedly _not_ look at Uhura. He actually manages to pay attention to most (**54%**) of the lecture today. By the time the hour is up, he feels like he's stepped into the Twilight Zone.

That feeling pretty much multiplies tenfold when Uhura actually _approaches_ him as he and Chekov are walking out.

"Can I talk to you for a second?" she asks him, her hand hovering over the place she would have tapped him on his forearm to get his attention had she not hesitated and let her mere proximity do the job.

And it's not anger that goes crawling up Jim's spine, then, nor is it distress. Maybe it's a weird, hybrid child emotion, more uneasy than pissed off. Whatever it is, it doesn't feel all that great, and Jim doesn't like that it goes zinging through him every time he's confronted with Uhura – when Chekov said her name earlier, when he was checking out his reflection in the mirror this morning, literally the entire fucking weekend when he could feel her every time he moved and his body would silently bitch at him in response.

He turns to her not knowing what to say, but her eyes and what they do to him pry his mouth open and draw the word, "Sure," out. It's the first time he's seen her today, and she doesn't look like the dark, wine-colored girl who ripped him a new asshole on **Friday**. Her button-down is white and her skirt is vermillion with black pockets, her books are at home in the crook of her left arm, and her bangs are swept away from her face.

Uhura makes a brief, hitching sigh in her throat (which Jim takes to mean that she's nervous), then says to him, right outside room **E215** on the **second floor** of the English building, "I'm sorry."

A moderately lengthy moment of silence passes between them. Chekov shifts awkwardly behind Jim as he studies Uhura's face, which is wearing the same elegant, practiced aloofness it always does, but with a touch of openness to it, a vulnerability behind the smoldering embers in her eyes, and Jim honestly doesn't have the foggiest idea what to do with it or with her apology, so, in typical Jim Kirk fashion, he doesn't do _anything_, just stares at her like he's spontaneously lost the ability to comprehend the English language. Let's all give him a great big round of applause, shall we?

Uhura seems to interpret his silence as a lack of acceptance (which it isn't, but it isn't quite not either), because her expression does something kind of like a pyramid, goes sharp and steep and even a little bit anxious, and she keeps talking, says, "It was wrong of me to make assumptions about the kind of person you are when... when I don't even know you, really. I don't blame you for taking offense to that, and I shouldn't have been so hard on you."

Jim suddenly remembers the uncomfortable, drowning sort of feeling he'd been assaulted with when he was apologizing to Uhura over the phone on **Friday**, the awkwardness of shucking his pride in favor of remorse. It occurs to him that Uhura is more than likely experiencing the same discomfort at the moment and that she's probably been sitting on her apology for all of the past hour (and possibly even longer than that), and for some reason, that really, _really_ endears her to him.

"I do stand by my choice to reject your advances, though," she adds, the tiniest hint of amusement taking hold of her features. Oddly enough, that's what manages to snap Jim out of his stupor and put a small smile on his face.

"Oh, yeah, well." He lets out a brief, sheepish chuckle. "I was totally annoying and rude about it, I get that."

And thus Jim Kirk, **eighteen years-old**, has slowly begun to learn the meaning of humility.

"But, uh... thank you. For saying that, I mean." Jim's smirk takes on a softer, warmer edge, not quite as impishly delighted as it usually is. "I guess I forgive you," he teases, the statement only half-genuine.

Uhura mirrors his smile, adjusts her grip on the books in her arm, and replies, so much more tender than she's ever been up until now, "I guess I forgive you, too." Just like that, Jim's partial lie becomes a straight-up truth, and he thinks he might have fallen in love with her all over again.

(A small note: Jim tends to go through most of his relationships at about **twenty times** the speed everyone else does. For example, he's been looking at McCoy a whole lot like he would a lifelong friend even though he's only known him for, what, a little over **two weeks**? Uhura over here might as well be his recently divorced ex-wife he's trying to rekindle his relationship with. Sometimes, he even catches himself thinking along the lines that Spock is his _friend_, as if _that_ will ever fucking happen.)

"Can we start over?" The grin splayed across Jim's face is wide and luminous and a whole lot like the late August sun, and he couldn't be arsed to do a goddamn thing about it when he does the single most trite, hackneyed thing of all time and holds his hand out for her to shake, says, "Jim Kirk, resident jackass."

Uhura chuckles lightly, taking his hand in her surprisingly strong grip and giving it a hearty shake. "Nyota Uhura, part-time bitch," she replies. Jim is already enamored with her sense of humor.

Uhura's gaze then skates on past his shoulder and her smile broadens a bit, and Jim realizes only a second before she opens her mouth to speak that it's _Chekov_ she's looking at, asking, "And who might you be?"

"Oh! Uhm..." Jim steps to the side to ever-so generously let the teen sputter to her face, smirks as Chekov nervously shakes Uhura's hand and introduces himself. "Pavel Chekov, ma'am."

"Very nice to meet you," she says with a brief, musical little laugh that warms Jim to his very core. It's nice, you know, to see her happy and have it not be from what feels like a world and a half away.

Jim and Chekov walk Uhura to the library before heading off to the cafeteria to meet McCoy and Sulu for lunch. She gives each of them a gracious nod of farewell on her way into brownstone fortress, and then she's gone, lost beyond the heavy double-doors.

Now, it wouldn't at all to be inaccurate to say that for the remainder of that day and the next, Jim is plagued with the somewhat irrational fear that the understanding he and Uhura have come to is only temporary, that as soon as they see each other again, she will be back to treating him like dirt and he will be back to being the apparent bane of her existence.

"Don't you think you're being a little melodramatic?" Sulu asks him on **Tuesday **night as he's sauteing a pan of chopped mushrooms at the stove.

Jim shrugs where he sits atop the counter, thumbing at the neck of his bottle of Heineken and dragging the hem of his shirt up to wipe at the perspiration filming over his forehead. "Can't say that's not my style." Sulu smirks.

"Sounds like you gotta chip on yer shoulder, my friend," is McCoy's totally uncalled-for observation, hurled Jim's way from where the man is currently watching an episode of _House Hunters_ in the living room.

"Sounds like you can _kiss my ass!_" Jim yells back. Several minutes later, he's trying to get McCoy to do just that, climbing over the back of the sofa and unceremoniously shoving his rear end in his face. Bones just about _throws _him across the couch and scolds him with the most colorful assortment of cusswords Jim has ever heard in his life, all while he's lying bent over the arm of the sofa and killing himself laughing and Sulu is yelling at them from the kitchen to behave themselves.

And you know, Bones might actually be on to something, with that whole _chip on his shoulder_ thing. I mean, as long as it hurts for Jim to lie down or laugh or simply turn over in bed, he's going to remember everything Uhura said to him at that awful party and it's going to sting regardless of the fact that he forgave her for it all. That's the funny thing about apologies and time.

Jim goes to English on **Wednesday **still quietly nursing his anxiety and fear, his eye now more yellow than amethyst and his back still slightly sore. He doesn't see Uhura in her usual spot when he and Chekov are locating their seats, and for a second, he's actually worried that he's going to have to spend _another_**two days** losing his head over his own stupid sense of dread.

But, just before Jim abandons all hope of being any kind of Zen until **Friday** and about **a minute** before she'd be considered late for class, Uhura shows up looking slightly, uncharacteristically flustered. For the first time since the day Jim met her, she's wearing a pair of pants – _jeans_, in fact – and a familiar button-down shirt free of any telling coffee stains. The sight of it brings a small smile to Jim's face.

And then, much to the immense surprise of both him _and_ Chekov, Uhura wastes no time in finding them with her eyes, adjusting her shoulder strap, and actually _making her way over to them_ without even a hint of hesitation. She steals the desk directly to the right of Jim, neatly placing her notebooks atop it as she drops into the seat, and her voice is slightly amused when she says, "You planning on scooping your jaw up off the floor any time soon?"

Jim quickly turns his expression of shock into one of delight. "You're looking decidedly casual today," he notes, and when she cuts her eyes at him, warning him, he puts a defensive hand up and adds, "Not in a bad way, I mean. It's..." He carefully tastes the word on his tongue before he lets it out, trying to decide how flirtatious it might come off to her and whether or not he's allowed to offhandedly flirt with her in the first place, considering their history. "Cute." And then, "Unusual."

"Well, I was in a hurry to get out of the apartment this morning," Uhura says. At Jim's inquisitive look, she smirks and clarifies, "Random naked guys in my kitchen aren't exactly the best thing to wake up to."

Jim lets out a loud, semi-embarrassing snort that Uhura only smiles at. "Please tell me you weren't getting like... burgled in the most offensively sexual way possible."

"_I_ wasn't, but apparently my roommate was," Uhura replies as she pulls out her laptop and a ballpoint pen. "_All_ night long."

Jim throws his head back and laughs wholeheartedly at the euphemism. Yet again, he keeps on falling for her.

And so it goes that Uhura becomes a semi-permanent fixture in Jim's life for all of **a week and a half**. Every **Monday**, **Wednesday**, and **Friday** at **9:30** in the morning, she will take a seat next to him in English and Jim and Chekov will accompany her on her way to the library afterwards, and during these class periods and these walks, Jim learns several varied and assorted facts about her, some of which include:

- She was raised in Washington, D.C. from the tender age of two, but her birthplace is none other than the capital of _Kenya_ (a fact to which Jim reacts with great surprise and wonder).

- Her father is the United States ambassador to Kenya and her mother became a zoologist after moving from her native country to America. They met and courted each other several times while her father was stationed in Africa.

- Uhura is double-majoring in international relations and communications. She hopes to someday be an ambassador like her father herself.

- All together, her name means "star of love and freedom" in Swahili (and that's really, _really_ beautiful).

- She can speak a grand total of _**ten**_ foreign languages with varying degrees of proficiency.

- Some of her favorite things in the world include Russian literature, a nice and aggressive game of tennis, frequent visits to art galleries, and the sweet sounds of Frank Ocean.

Of course, Jim also learns one singular fact about himself:

- He was right, about not wanting to date her.

It's not that he doesn't think she's great or anything, because he _does_, many times over in fact. But he'd be crazy if he thought that after all he's discovered about her – her strength and her fire and her everything beautiful and piercing and bright – that he could actually give her what she wanted, that she wouldn't surpass him in every way that counted. It's no biggie, though. He still thinks he's smitten with her.

On **Monday, August 26****th**, Jim comes home, kicks back on the couch, and logs onto Facebook to find a friend request from a certain Nyota Uhura waiting for him. He spends the next **hour and a half **raiding all of her pictures and postings like the stalker-in-training he is, eyeing her _About_ page (specifically her relationship status, which is _Single_ with a capital _S_), and marveling at their new status as _friends_, at least in the digital sense.

On **Wednesday, August 28****th**, he, she, and Chekov exchange phone numbers, passing their cellphones around to key them into each other's contact lists. The whole exchange gives Jim a little thrill of happiness he's only comfortable with admitting to Chekov as they're retreating from the library in the direction of the cafeteria.

And on **Friday, August 30****th**, Uhura drops two squares of cardstock on Jim's desk and says, in a moderately imperative tone, "Come to my party tomorrow."

Jim eyes the invitations with curiosity and deduces that the party, like the last one he attended, is located off campus. "Are there gonna be any hot girls there?" he asks in a half-hearted attempt to seem mildly disinterested (which he by no means is).

"Well, _I'll_ be there," Uhura retorts, smirking wickedly. Jim tries and fails to pinch her for that. "_Yes_, there will be hot girls abound." She gives him an unambiguously naughty look. "_Guys_, too."

Jim just about gags on his own spit. "_Excuse me?_"

"You're not the only Facebook stalker in this outfit, Kirk," she purrs. "I did my fair share of research, too."

And this, my friends, is why Jim Kirk is in love with Nyota Uhura. He tells her so, too.

"I'm like in love with you, you know that?" See?

"I know, I know," she replies, sweet and just casual enough to make the moment perfect. She's good at doing that, Jim has noticed.

"Can I come to ze party?" Chekov pipes in rather adorably from Jim's other side, poking his curly head around to be seen.

"Of course you can!" Uhura is enthusiastic in her reception, smiling and crinkle-eyed and just as radiant as can be. She gives Jim a light rap on the forearm. "You know what, bring your whole household. It'll be fun."

So, on **Saturday, August 31****st** at **7:17 PM**, Jim, Chekov, McCoy, and Sulu pile into McCoy's outdated Accord and head off to the party, this time with Jim riding shotgun while Sulu and Chekov are left to their own devices – '_to be gay, or whatever_,' in Jim's words – in the backseat.

"You know he's a minor, right?" Sulu says, flicking Jim in the ear from behind.

Instead of commenting on that, Jim turns all the way around in his seat – inciting a reproachful '_Turn yer ass around and put yer goddamn seatbelt on_,' out of Bones when he does – and asks, blasé as anything, "Chekov, have you ever had sex before?"

Chekov goes so red in the face he looks like his poor little head might burst from the pressure. Meanwhile, the noises coming out of Sulu sound just a tad urgent, all choking laughter and high-pitched wailing.

"Don't answer that," Sulu weeps through his helpless cackling, slapping a hand against Chekov's knee (and consequently intensifying the blush in the teen's cheeks). "_Please_, for my sake more than anyone else's. Just don't."

"What, you scared he'll ruin your perfect fantasy of him as some delicate, virginal flower?" Jim teases, and when Sulu actually starts _wheezing_, the most maniacal of grins splits his face right in two. "Watch he turns out to be a total freak, man. Does that make you hot?"

"Uh, you need to shut the fuck up with that in my car," McCoy snaps, making an overly sharp left turn. "I mean, right the fuck now. Before I reach over there smack the hell outta you."

Snickering, Jim rights himself in his seat, grinding his hips ever so slightly and softly singing, "_He's a very freaky boy..._"

Sulu kicks the back of Jim's seat and lets out a guttural snarl of laughter at the exact same moment that McCoy's hand goes flying over the center console to bop him in the ear, knuckles first. Chekov mutters something Russian and flustered beneath his breath, sinking as deeply as he possibly can into his car seat.

They all love each other, can't you tell?

Soon, they are pulling up to a neat, gated, decidedly posh apartment complex by the name of _Orion Peaks_ and Jim is digging around in the darkness of the car for the invitation, which he most likely dropped on the floor while he was busy harassing Chekov and Sulu. He reads the entry code printed at the bottom of the card out loud to McCoy, and then the next **six minutes** or so are spent searching for the high-rise indicated on the invite, a Building E.

"You better not get in another fight tonight, ya hear?" Bones says to Jim as they're stepping out of the car and making their way towards the flight leading to the upstairs apartments. "That would be, what? Yer fourth one in less than a month?"

"_Fifth_," Jim corrects him with a smirk. He gives McCoy an amiable pat on the back before he's taking the stairs two at a time, chuckling, "I promise I'll behave myself," over his shoulder.

"I bet you like, ten bucks he's going to break that promise before we're even in there for five minutes," Sulu says from behind Bones.

"I might as well just give you the money now, huh?" McCoy sighs, shifting the bottle of vodka he's carrying from one hand to another. Sulu's responding laugh is sharp and amused.

"You know, your astounding lack of faith in me is truly upsetting," Jim says, tone full of manufactured hurt, as the **four** of them approach Apartment **E09**. Behind the door, the sound of synth-heavy music and a bass drum beat can be heard. "Really, I'm hurt."

"Oh, I'm _sorry_," McCoy drawls in an affected tone. "Remind me of that the next time I have to peel you off the floor and wipe the blood offa yer face."

"That was one time!" Jim retorts, (admittedly) smiling, as Sulu slips between him and Bones to rap a two-tone knock against the door.

"It won't be for long at the rate yer goin'," Bones huffs. If Jim didn't know any better, that would be the tiniest of smirks playing on the man's lips.

Before he can argue back, though, the door is swinging open and Uhura is standing on the opposite side of it. Her eyes land on Sulu first (obviously), and as soon as they do, this expression of surprise of the vaguely delighted sort comes over her face and she cries, "Sulu?"

Said man smiles brightly. "Hey!"

Uhura looks between him and Jim, who is just sort of standing off to the side being all stupidly charmed by the exchange, and says, "I didn't know you guys roomed together."

Jim shrugs like that's actually wholly his fault. "Oops."

Uhura's awed smile starts to mirror Sulu's ever so slightly, and she opens the door wider to let them into the apartment, beckoning them with a pleased, "Come on in, guys. The party's just getting started." She gives Chekov, the designated caboose of their **four**-man train by way of his inherent shyness and the minor emotional trauma he underwent earlier, a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek on his way inside.

When they walk in, there are about **fifteen** students scattered about the living room and more, by the sounds of it, in the kitchen, all in clusters of **three**, **four**, and the odd group of **five**. None of them are people Jim immediately recognizes (not that that's a problem or anything).

"You guys," Uhura calls everyone present to attention with a single clap of her hands, people raising their heads from their drinks and pausing their conversations all over the room. She gestures to each member of their band as she says, "This is Kirk, Sulu, Chekov, and...?"

"McCoy," Bones helpfully supplies, smiling cordially as he holds out his hand for Uhura to shake. "Leonard McCoy." Jim indulges himself in a furtive little chuckle at that, amused with the thought of just how much he's talked to Bones about Uhura without the man even having known her personally, and how much of that such talk was him _bitching_ about her.

Uhura returns McCoy's handshake with warmth. "Nice to meet you, Mr. McCoy."

Just as Jim is starting to ogle a pretty red-haired girl idling in the corner, this loud, incredibly thick Scottish accent comes sailing out of the kitchen, yelling, "We 'ave newcomers, ey?" Only seconds later, a man of moderately short stature is sauntering into the living room, juggling a bottle of margarita mix and several lemons in both hands and eyeballing Jim, McCoy, Sulu, and Chekov as if they're aliens recently arrived from a foreign planet. Uhura gives him a mildly patronizing smile.

"You just missed the introductions, Scott," she laughs, crossing the room to give his shoulder a quick squeeze.

"Is he 'Scott' because he's Scottish?" Jim blurts without thinking, just as forthright and possibly rude as he always is. He's both relieved and tickled when the man howls wildly in response (instead of, I don't know, getting pissed off and throwing a lemon at Jim's head or something).

"You sure know 'ow to pick 'em, yeah, Uhura?" he chuckles, and then he's turning to address Jim and the rest of his party, introducing himself with his strident, rapid manner of speaking. "Montgomery Scott. Call me what you like." Before anyone can answer him, he's waving the hand holding the margarita mix and saying, "Don't bother with your names, I'll learn 'em soon enough."

He's a bit abrasive and he sounds a little drunk, but Jim is the same way more often than not, so he decides he likes him well enough for having just met him.

Only a moment after Scott starts brandishing the bottle around in the air, a hand is darting through the doorway to take it from him and Spock is gliding out of the kitchen – just for a few seconds – to steal a couple of lemons from the man and say, "Careful, Mr. Scott. I'm going to need that if you plan on getting any more intoxicated tonight."

Scott laughs his raucous, radiant laugh as he surrenders his bounty to Spock, chortling, "You know me too well, my friend." He then turns back to our favorite foursome, beckons them closer with a flourish of his now free hand and says, "Come on, loosen up now! Once Mr. Spock does 'is magic, we'll get a few drinks in you and we'll blow the lid off this place, yeah?"

As Jim lets himself be led to the couch by Scott, he and Spock make the briefest, most ephemeral instant of eye contact, and it's just like last week when he was getting beaten to a pulp in front of more than **three times** the number of people in this apartment alone, except now, Jim feels like it's Spock's gaze dealing him all that abuse, and he's not entirely sure why.

And again, when they're all sitting around the coffee table and Scott is having what's close to resembling a stroke after having been informed that Chekov is only **sixteen years-old** – "_And you're telling me you're on your way to mastering the theory of subdivision of energy?_" he exclaims – Jim catches Spock's eye as the man is carefully placing **four** margarita glasses brimming with lime green slush on the table, damn near _winks_ at the guy while he's at it, just to see how he might react, but the moment is over as soon as Sulu asks, "Could you get one for him, too?"

Spock glances at Chekov. "Virgin?" he asks. The quietest of snorts escapes Jim, who, as far as we know, has suddenly regressed to being about **eleven years-old** in the span of **three seconds**; Spock's eyebrow twitches the slightest bit, an action Jim has started to notice almost compulsively.

"Oh, he can hold his liquor," Sulu replies, nudging Chekov's shoulder with his own. Bones lets out a snort louder than Jim's, incredulous.

"O-_kay_, Sulu," he huffs. "You wanna repeat that after I remind you about last Saturday, when the kid was singing Cyndi Lauper at the top of his lungs and tryin'a skate across the kitchen floor in his socks?"

"I think that was me trying to skate across the kitchen floor," Jim notes. There goes Spock's eyebrow again.

"Yer right, it was," McCoy says, clinking his glass against Jim's when he holds it up for cheers. Sulu makes a preemptive, clucking sort of noise.

"He can hold his liquor," he repeats with a smile. Scott laughs loudly at his right.

"I like you guys!" he pipes. "You're a fuckin' riot, s'what you are!"

Spock does this little nodding thing with his head that Jim realizes maybe **a week** later means he sees no further utility in remaining part of the conversation taking place. For now, though, Jim is absolutely _enthralled_ with the gesture.

"I'll be back momentarily," he says, giving Jim one last imperceptible look before he's off to the kitchen, where Uhura is currently singing something poppy and upbeat – "._.. says he's gonna teach me just what fast is, say it's gonna be alright..._"

Now, I'm going to stop for **a second or two** and let you know that there are **three** things worth noting at this point in our story:

**One**, that Jim is positively fascinated with Spock.

**Two**, that he honestly hasn't been able to stop thinking about him and his odd way of speaking and his odd little mannerisms and his odd, _odd_ eyes since last Friday and that moment during the fight, the tiny looks they'll pass each other when they think the other won't notice, their timing all wrong.

**Three**, that the feeling I mentioned in the first bullet, that lovely captivation that's usually only reserved for the most foreign of creatures, is entirely mutual. Don't tell anyone, though. That's supposed to be a secret.

There comes a time – a very, _very_ rare and special time, almost phenomenal in nature – when two extraordinary things just so happen to collide, even if only slightly. Collisions of that nature have been happening again and again and again since **August 12****th****, 2013**, when Jim Kirk decided to follow the girl who'd captured his affections into a library, and they aren't going to stop any time soon.

In the meantime, though, Spock is bringing Chekov his non-virgin margarita – only a couple of side-glances at Jim involved – Sulu, McCoy, and Jim are taking sips from it as well as their own drinks – which they always do, by the way – Scott is quite vocally falling in love with the **four** of them – he even dubs Jim his '_new best friend_' after he tells him the tale of how he ended up stranded in the middle of a **twelve-acre** field at **four o'clock** in the morning all the way back in Riverside, wearing nothing but a pink pair of panties – and this party is turning out to be quite a hell of a lot better than the first one. They drink, they dance, they sing along to Eurythmics and talk quantum theory and American history – questions of '_President you'd most like to smoke a joint with?_' and '_Dead celebrity you'd most like to fuck?_' flying at top speed across the coffee table – and soon, Jim is sipping mai tais and laughing his ass off with Uhura in the doorway of the kitchen while Chekov is in the process of giving Sulu a clumsy, alcohol-fueled lap dance and McCoy is digging around in his wallet for **twenty dollar** bills to throw the teen's way.

"Ge' some fifties in there!" Scott hoots over the rim of his Bloody Mary. "He works hard for the money!"

"_God_ help me," Sulu moans helplessly, grabbing at Chekov's hips in a desperate attempt to make him stand still, or at least keep him from getting any closer to his pelvis. Instead, the teen flops bodily into his lap, giggling madly into the back of his hand. Uhura makes a pleased, purring noise in her throat.

"Aren't they just adorable?" she comments to Jim, playful and pleased as she lightly prods him in the bicep with her elbow.

"Aren't they just _illegal?_" Jim retorts, grinning when Uhura lets out a loud, whooping laugh in response. "Sulu wouldn't bad-touch him if his life depended on it. He's like some kind of knight in shining armor."

"_Yeah_, a knight in shining armor with an incredibly cute boy gyrating in his lap at the moment," Uhura points out in between sips of her drink. Jim gives her a quick slap on the side for that.

"Chekov's sixteen," he says, all authoritarian and huffy and like he totally didn't lose his virginity when he was nearly **two years** younger than that. He's full of weird double standards like that, in which he always expects everyone else to be infinitely more well-behaved than the hellion he's turned out to be.

"Chekov is a child prodigy and very nearly a genius who you let guzzle down margaritas and mojitos like it's nothing," Uhura throws back, turning to look at Jim directly. Her lip curls up into a self-satisfied smirk that Jim is absolutely smitten with. "I don't think a little heavy petting is that big a deal."

Jim quirks a face at her, says, "You know, when you call him a '_child prodigy_' it just makes this whole thing _that_ much sketchier." Uhura laughs at him again, reaching out to whack him in the forearm. "Now I'm thinking about him like he's _eleven_."

"Oh, _stop_," Uhura soothes over the rim of her glass. "Let them have their fun."

Jim throws a glance in their direction, surreptitious. Sulu is currently attempting to steady Chekov, who has just begun to topple over in his delirium, in his lap, chuckling sheepishly as he takes a long drag from his margarita and watching as McCoy salvages about **a hundred and thirty-five** dollars from the carpet and the coffee table. Jim can't help but smile at the sight.

"Whatever," he snickers, downs the rest of his mai tai with a grin. "I'm not the one going to prison for statutory rape."

When Uhura hits him again, she packs a bit more power behind her punch.

"Let me get you a refill, _Sheriff Kirk_," she teases, stealing Jim's now empty glass. She sashays her hips ever so slightly as she retreats into the kitchen, humming softly to the music pulsing from the sound system in the living room.

Jim's gaze remains glued to her as she goes bopping across the linoleum, singing, _"He can only hold her for so long..."_ and swaying right up to Spock, who is busy mixing drinks like he's been doing for the vast majority of the party so far. He watches, almost mesmerized, as she clunks the glasses in her hands down against the counter and deftly plucks Spock's fingers away from the lemon he's juicing, pulls him into easy two-step, his right hand instinctively going up to rest against her left shoulderblade. She drops a cursory kiss on the patch of skin directly to the right and below his mouth, and the expression that feathers across Spock's face then isn't quite a smile, but it's pretty damn close for him, the _android_. He doesn't pull away from her, doesn't do anything but let her dance him around the kitchen and sing into the space above his shoulder, and Jim would swear to anyone that in this moment, he doesn't look like the arrogant, detached heartbreaker McCoy insisted he was only **two weeks** ago. In fact, he almost comes off as _warm_.

And really, Jim doesn't know what that – the dancing, the little displays of affection, the Pacific Ocean of ease between the two of them – does to him. He doesn't know if it bothers him, if he's uncomfortable or just a little overheated, if that's really a knot of gravity growing in his chest, how the hell the human brain manages to trick the body into physically feeling such things. He doesn't know how it makes him feel _at all _and he's much too drunk for that sort of in-depth comprehension and soul-searching right now and _yeah_, he's happy Uhura's his friend now and he still likes the fire in her eyes and her touch thrills him a little and he just had a good laugh with her in the middle of her house party and that's _great_, and _yeah_, he isn't completely certain about _anything_ concerning Spock aside from the fact that he might be a little unhealthily obsessed with him and that he's been seeing him _way_ to much over the course of the month of August considering the fact that they're not even _friends_, they're barely even _acquaintances_, really, and Jim has seen Uhura's relationship status on Facebook and he didn't feel anything but a twinge of relief at having finally solved the ongoing mystery of it when he did, but Spock isn't supposed to be half-smiling at kisses from a freshman and Jim kind of wants to be friends with his nerdy, impossibly stony self, only a little, kind of wants to be the one dancing to Amy Winehouse with Uhura on that linoleum floor, and he's known her just as long as Spock has and he's her friend too, now, and that's fair, right? He doesn't know.

He takes off his jacket, though, just in case it's the temperature getting to him.

The minutes turn into hours spent spinning, drunk, laughing and carousing and talking and laughing some more, Jim perched on the edge of the coffee table while he takes turns playing _red hands_ with McCoy and Scott, Sulu and Chekov drifting around the room to mingle with the other partygoers, Uhura and Spock drinking wine and conversing softly by the kitchen, voices hushed and susurrating. Eventually, Jim ends up with a mouthful of gorgeous redhead – he learns her name is Gaila at some point between finding her hands pressed firm and warm against his shoulders and slipping his tongue into her mouth – and a brain far too addled with alcohol and lust. Eventually, Chekov passes out in Sulu's lap and the two of them are suddenly nowhere to be seen, disappeared or whisked off to somewhere Jim really doesn't have the brain capacity to give a shit about. Eventually, McCoy and Scott are nearly falling over each other in their intoxication and passionately swapping stories from their childhoods in Athens and Aberdeen, respectively, drawing a small crowd around the coffee table as the night wears on.

Eventually, everything begins to blur.

* * *

**Sunday, September 1****st****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk wakes up with his face shoved deep into the crevices of a sofa cushion.

The **first** thing he becomes aware of is the splitting pain in his head, a blade of agony slicing straight from the center of his cranium to the spot between his eyes, right where it makes him suddenly, incredibly desperate for something like death. Then there is the appallingly awful taste coating the inside of his mouth and the back of his throat, the remarkable thirst voiding his oral cavity of any and all moisture, the pit in the base of his stomach, absolutely abysmal. Every joint in his body seems to be screaming at him.

Put simply, it is the **second**-worst hangover he's had in his entire life. The worst one put him in the hospital for a night.

Jim slowly, arduously struggles to turn onto his back so that he might be able to breathe better or observe his surroundings with more efficiency, but he soon realizes that there's something heavy and warm keeping him trapped where he is – a _body_, specifically. It takes him no longer than **two seconds** to recognize the body's deafening snore as none other than McCoy's, and only an instant more to attempt to spontaneously self-destruct via sheer brainpower so as to remove himself from the cruel, cacophonous world he's in, so full of pain and unpleasant physiological responses.

Jim lays there for maybe **seven minutes**, staring mindlessly at the tiny little fibers covering the suede cushion his face is smushed against and counting the snores that come ripping out of his friend beside him before he registers that he's still in Uhura's apartment and that he must have drank at least **two and a half gallons** of alcohol last night. Like leaves caught in an autumn breeze, memories of the party go drifting through his mind – Chekov's brief and memorable stint as an erotic dancer, the feeling of Gaila's full breasts beneath his palms, the tale of how Scott nearly drowned himself and two of his classmates in the River Dee at the age of **seven**, the red, stinging pain in his hands after getting them slapped by Bones easily over **forty **times, Uhura and Spock's brief dance in the kitchen. Considering his current state of agony and the probability that he will be hungover for _days_, Jim considers last night's soiree to be one of the best he's ever been to, certainly one worth remembering long after today.

It's when he comes to terms with the fact that he really doesn't want to pee all over Uhura's nice sofa (and McCoy, by extension) that Jim finally musters up enough willpower to carefully ooze himself out of the cranny Bones has him confined in and climb over the man to stand on the carpet, a sea surrounding the archipelago of bodies randomly sprawled out in various places on the living room floor. A wave of nausea and dizziness washes over him and threatens to send him toppling over as soon as he's upright, but he quickly catches himself on the arm of the sofa and takes several moments to curb the urge to empty the contents of his abdominal cavity onto Scott, who is lying face-down and halfway underneath the coffee table, completely unconscious. He thanks whatever invisible entity that might just be occupying the room at the moment for his expertise where hangovers and gag reflexes are concerned.

Then there is him pawing his way down the hallway, locating the bathroom, and relieving himself in almost total darkness, silently praying that he doesn't accidentally make a mess out of the room in his fully conscious decision to forgo the pain turning on the light would entail. He drops the toilet seat to flush so he doesn't have to confront the noise of the water rushing down the drain, again picking up on his first-hand knowledge on how to best deal with hangovers.

Never let it be said that Jim Kirk isn't a smart man (and, I mean, why would you when he's kind of a genius anyway?).

After sort of washing his hands and wandering back out into the hallway, Jim finds himself incredibly drawn to the crack in the door directly across from the bathroom through the thick gauze of discomfort he's swathed in. He has no common sense and several unaddressed impulse control issues, so – as is his nature – he doesn't stop himself from carefully, quietly sweeping the door open and peering inside, just as endlessly curious as he always is.

It's a bedroom, the walls painted a muted, cornflower blue and the molding lining the ceiling and windows a clean shade of white. To be honest, the **first** word that enters Jim's mind upon seeing it is _sterile_, which turns into a more favorable _immaculate _once he passes his gaze over it a second time, as there isn't a thing in the room out of place, all the books on the bookshelf neatly arranged and bookended, no stray articles of clothing or pieces of trash on the carpeted floor, the desk before the window neat and mostly bare. The sheer white curtains are pulled tidily closed.

Upon Jim's **fifth **or **sixth** sweep of the room, he discerns a sleeping mound of a person lying beneath the midnight-colored sheets on the bed – an Uhura, in fact, stretched out on her left side with her arm curled elegantly below her head. Her face is serene and soft in her slumber, a near total opposite of the one she wears while awake, and Jim is helplessly mesmerized by the way her hair feathers over her forehead, the angle at which the filtered light hits her cheekbone, the supple curve of her hip under the cloth covering it.

He nearly shits himself when he sees Spock in the chaise not **two feet** behind the bed.

After about **ten whole seconds** of pure, unadulterated _panic –_ the kind that has his heart thudding violently against his ribcage and his breath rushing out of him in an awful, almost painful burst – Jim realizes that Spock is just as conscious as Uhura is, that his eyes are closed and his mouth is only slightly ajar as he lays curled beneath an elaborately-patterned quilt, an explosion of color in the otherwise monochromatic room. Even though impassive in his sleep, his expression is impossibly gentle, maybe even a little angelic, and so, _so_ incredibly far from the meticulous severity and careful dispassion Jim is used to seeing on his face. It's almost eerie.

Once it occurs to Jim that it's actually pretty fucking creepy that he's watching both Uhura and Spock sleep like it's no big deal (especially considering that he's been friends with one of them for only a week and the other he's pretty sure kind of _hates_ him a little; how he came to this conclusion, no one knows, but it has a little something to do with the less-than-amiable picture McCoy painted of him and the rough start they got off to), he scoots his ass right on out of the doorway and back into the hall, where he's stuck quietly marveling at what he just witnessed, the situation he's in.

That's when he notices the picture on the wall.

Upon closer inspection, Jim finds that the photograph is one of a classic New York City apartment, a pretty old brownstone with a faded white door. On the thick, wide cement steps stands a man, a woman, and a boy who looks about **thirteen** or **fourteen** **years of age**.

Some things Jim takes note of the longer he looks at the picture, in chronological order:

- All **three** people in the picture are _white_, or at least they look like they are. The woman and the boy are a little more olive-toned than the man, but not by a whole lot.

- None of them look even remotely like Uhura, and the woman is a far cry from the native Kenyan she spoke of to him.

- Also, they're _white_.

- Again, the picture was taken in front of a New York brownstone. That's a whole **227 miles** from Washington, D.C.

- The man is long-jawed and stern-faced, buttoned up in a scrupulously tailored black suit and neatly clasping his hands before him. He doesn't look like he's seen a happy day in all his life.

- By contrast, the woman is smiling warmly into the camera, her eyes crinkling at the corners, her dimples digging into her cheeks. Her long, wavy hair is tied in a loose braid slung over her left shoulder and her arms are draped around the shoulders of the boy between her and the man beside her. Just looking at her makes Jim feel small and soothed and **six years-old** again.

- The boy is tall for his age, gangly and lanky and cursed with bony, broad shoulders and too-long legs. He's wearing a suit akin to the one on the man and similarly tailored. His hair is short and neat and inky in color, his expression bashful, withdrawn, detached, his eyes just as dark and abysmal as can be.

- His eyes are just as dark and abysmal as can be.

- Wait.

- Those are Spock's eyes.

- The boy is Spock.

- Holy _shit_, the boy is _Spock_.

It hits Jim like an eighteen-wheeler hurtling towards him at **eighty miles per hour **that he's standing in the middle of _Spock's_ apartment – _not_ Uhura's – and that he's _been_ in Spock's apartment for over **fifteen consecutive hours** and he hasn't even known it, not until now. Suddenly, it makes a **thousand times** more sense to him why the bedroom was so colorless and tidy and why Spock was in there with Uhura instead of, I don't know, kicking it with the rest of the people passed out in the living room, and how fitting is it that he would live alone, distanced from the hectic, social nature of campus life?

(_Extraordinarily_ fitting.)

Jim spends the next **six minutes** or so clumsily surveying the flat while trying his best not to disturb anything, overtaken by an insatiable desire to gather as much information as he can about Spock, however superficial and arbitrary that information may be. After all, he's been perplexed by the man's existence ever since that day in the library, and we all know how it is with Jim Kirk and compulsive behavior, don't we?

A quick inspection of Spock's apartment yields:

- More photographs of the stone-faced man, his sunshiney wife, and the dark, diffident boy anxious to look directly at the camera.

- A mostly bare refrigerator, supplied only with **six** or **seven** bottles of Dasani, **two** cucumbers, a head of lettuce, **three** tomatoes, and a few take-out containers. A calendar, another picture of the woman (who Jim is only assuming is Spock's mother), a grocery list, and a phone number labeled '_Nyota_' in neat, blocked handwriting are carefully magneted to the freezer door.

- Several bottles of various liquors from last night sitting on the kitchen counter.

- A trashcan a **fifth** of the way full of lemon peels.

- A PlayStation 3 and **two** DualShock controllers.

- A CD rack stocked with artists like Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Daft Punk, The xx, Phoenix, and even _Billie Holiday _(cue a vaguely mystified hum from Jim).

- Minimalistic, simple décor, all geometric sculptures and art deco-style prints.

- Not a single speck of dust or dirt to be found.

Jim is inspecting a picture of Spock sitting beside a pretty, exotic-looking girl with eyes and hair just as dark as his on an old park bench when a loud, hilariously anguished groan pierces the silence of the apartment, has him jumping in both pain and surprise and scrambling frantically away from the shelf he's nosing at, suddenly a world-class ninja of sorts. He promptly feels like a complete and utter buffoon when he looks up to see McCoy laboriously pushing himself into a sitting position, sweeping his squinted gaze around the room like some kind of drunk, pissed off crocodile until it lands on him where he's standing awkwardly in the middle of the living room with his hands clutching at the front of his t-shirt. McCoy literally _growls_.

"The fuck're you doin'?" he grunts, obviously just as hungover and miserable as Jim is, if not more. Jim thrills at the thought of how ridiculously _grumpy_ the man must be at the moment, he really does.

"Research," he replies, making his way over to the sofa more so he can stop being so uncomfortable and useless than for any other reason. He pushes a hand against McCoy's shoulder when he tries to stand up, warns, "Don't get up too fast. You might lose your lunch."

"I've had hangovers before, Jim," Bones retorts with heat, slapping his hand away and doing exactly the opposite of what he was told. He doesn't even stumble once he's on his feet. "Prob'ly many more'n you've had."

Something warm and fuzzy buzzes in Jim's center at McCoy's snarling, petulant tone, the muss of his hair and the thicket steadily growing on his jaw and chin. It gives him life, you know, to see Bones being Bones.

"What time s'it?" McCoy half-snaps at him as he regards the crime scene they're stranded in, all the unconscious bodies flopped out on the floor.

Jim digs his phone out of his back pocket. "Ten forty-seven."

"_Beautiful_," is McCoy's supremely sardonic reply, one that garners a straight-up _giggle_ out of Jim in its derision and his relative lack of self-consciousness.

"Where's Sulu and the Russian?" he asks once he's composed himself, not having seen them in the array of passed-out partygoers.

McCoy snorts something disdainful and amused. "That's right, _you_ wouldn't know," he huffs as he navigates the chain of bodies and starts heavily down the hallway, moving towards a doorway Jim failed to notice during his assessment of the apartment. His voice is mocking and affectionate when he adds, "Mister _Casanova_."

Gaila dashes through Jim's mind for a fraction of a second, almost highlighting the fact that within the past **fifteen minutes**, he has spied on Uhura in her sleep, snooped around his not-friend's apartment, and legitimately _giggled_. "You jealous?" he chuckles after Bones; it's almost a reflex for him to tease the man at this point.

"Redheads aren't my type," is McCoy's blunt, totally not-irritated answer, thrown Jim's way as he disappears through the doorway. And that's the end of that conversation.

When Bones returns several minutes later, he returns with Sulu and Chekov, the former carrying the sparsely-conscious latter on his back and in considerably better shape than the rest of them, owing to his seemingly infinite tolerance for drink. It takes about **three minutes** for them to elect Sulu as their designated driver, carefully chart a course around the sleeping bodies, and let themselves out of the apartment so they can head down to McCoy's car, Jim thoughtfully flicking the latch on the doorknob into its _locked_ position before pulling the door closed behind them. He steals one of Spock's bottles of Dasani on his way out.

It doesn't occur to him until **10:36** that evening that he forgot his jacket – as well as the pack of cigarettes and the lighter it held – draped over one of Spock's stupid art deco armchairs. The sigh that comes bursting out of him when he does is gale-force.

* * *

**Monday, September 2****nd****, 2013 – Friday, September 6****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk stands on the doorstep of Apartment **E09** and hesitates. From **12:23 PM** to **12:27 PM**, he breathes, rehearses, questions, hesitates, and breathes.

Some events leading up to his presence here:

- "_Shit!_" he cursed on his bedroom floor, suddenly realizing his lack of a jacket, the **seven **cigarettes he'd been smoking through since Thursday, and his trusty Zippo.

- McCoy gave him a funny sort of look from where he was folding one of his many flannel shirts on his bed, all angled, inquisitive brows and slightly pursed lips.

- '_Can u do me a favor?_' idled in his phone, ready to be SMS'd to Uhura, for about **eight minutes** before he backspaced through it all and mentally called himself a pussy for the next **hour and a half** for wanting her to be his middleman.

- Jim woke up at **11:18 AM** the next morning with absolutely no improvement in his resolve to retrieve his jacket.

- He spent **fifteen minutes** coming up with excuses not to, excuses such as: _I can wait until the next party Uhura has over there, which may not ever happen_ and _I can always buy another jacket, even though that one was a really good one_ and _Maybe if I wish hard enough, it'll magically appear to me_.

- After consulting his issue with McCoy, he was instructed, in no uncertain terms, to '_grow a pair and get over there, bitch_'.

- He brushed his teeth, pulled on an old Henley, fixed Chekov a quick bowl of corn flakes, and ate a Pop-Tart and a half with a glass of milk.

- His truck threatened to give out on him once he was in the driver's seat, diligently attempting to key the engine on.

- "_Shit_," he repeated.

- He nearly missed the driveway of _Orion Peaks_ by **two milliseconds**, and it only took him **three** tries to enter the correct gate code.

- He finished listening to his favorite Joy Division song before working up the willpower to remove himself from the cab of his truck, climb the stairs leading up to Apartment **E09**, stand on the doorstep, and hesitate.

- And here we are now.

Jim allows himself **two** practice knocks on the sheet of air just before the door – a measure taken in the name of his own silly sense of comfort – before rapping his knuckles **thrice** against the white wood, quickly and precisely. Like ripping off a Band-Aid.

You see, even though Jim does give a shit about his jacket and has more or less consciously decided that he's actually kind of-sort of interested in becoming Spock's friend (in addition to conducting an informal investigation of the man's mysteriously robotic nature, not that he'd ever openly admit to it), there are so many weird, somewhat unidentifiable feelings that start stewing inside him at the thought of Spock, some of which include:

- Fear.

- Awkwardness.

- That feeling where he's not certain whether or not Spock hates him or is just really fucking talented at looking semi-hostile at all times.

- That feeling where '_how does Uhura play into this, if she plays into it at all?_'.

- That feeling where he's pretty sure he and Spock's personalities aren't the slightest bit compatible.

- That feeling where he thinks the exact opposite.

- Indecisiveness.

- That feeling where he starts thinking of Spock as live game and himself as a hunter, only out to catch him for the thrill of it.

- That feeling where he knows Spock can see right through him.

- That feeling where that exhilarates him.

- Captivation.

- Most importantly, though, _fear_.

The vast majority of those feelings start having a field day in the forefront of Jim's mind the moment he finds himself standing across the open doorway from Spock, whose expression changes only marginally once they're stuck staring at each other, uncomfortable and surprised. A beat, then,

"Hey." The word comes out stronger, more sanguine than Jim thought it would. He gives himself a mental pat on the back.

Spock blinks, says, "Hello," in his perfect monotone, typically devoid of even the tiniest hint of inflection. Jim half-expected him to come out with something ridiculous and nerdy like '_salutations_' or some such shit, so he's pleasantly surprised and almost comically self-satisfied with the comparatively normal response he got instead.

But then he remembers that he's Jim Kirk and he's standing about **a foot **away from _Spock_ and he's here to get his jacket and possibly make or break their not-relationship, and just like that, he's awkward and afraid and indecisive and captivated all over again. There's a reason why he rehearsed this in his head.

"Uh, I think I forgot my jacket here yesterday?" It's not a question, but he voices it like one to pump a little moisture into the dry, stale air, reduce the relative concentration of discomfort between them, hell, maybe even to make himself look dumb and ditzy and charmingly absentminded like he's never, ever been in his life. People are supposed to like feeling smarter than you, right?

Spock's face does something subtle, silent. "I thought you would return for that at some point," he notes, more to himself than to Jim, easily sweeping the door open several inches wider and retreating into his apartment – an unspoken invitation to enter. It's about the most cordial thing Jim has ever witnessed Spock do, save for the dance he shared with Uhura at the party and that time when he told him he didn't want Uhura to kick his ass, and _hey_ – if Jim was being honest with himself, he'd know that the simple act of it thrilled him a little, in the way coaxing a wounded animal out of hiding does thrill. He's industrious and competitive like that.

Jim ends up a little lost in his awe of Spock's apartment once he's inside, his eyes greedily skimming over everything he examined so hastily the day before. It all looks so _different_, now, when the windows are open and everything is so much more washed out and the room is bathed in natural lighting and there isn't a human being occupying almost every bit of space, sitting on the couch or standing against the wall or sprawled all over the floor. There's a clean, almost clinical sort of spaciousness to it, the near antithesis of Jim and his roommates' apartment.

"You have... a really nice place," Jim comments, a little obtusely, as Spock momentarily vanishes down the hall and into his bedroom. "I mean, it looks way different. Without all the people, you know."

He is answered with total silence. Was that a tumbleweed that just went rolling through the room?

Several moments go by before Spock is reappearing with Jim's jacket in his grasp and belatedly replying, all crisp and precise like he always is, "Thank you."

"Thanks," Jim says when Spock hands over his jacket, then promptly forgets all about everything he's ever learned about normal human behavior and conducting casual conversations. If you think the brief exchange that has just been described sounds awkward, it's probably because it really, _really_ does.

So then there's this awful, wordless stretch of anxiety and tacit expectancy that passes between them for a whopping total of **twelve whole seconds**, **twelve seconds** of unbroken eye contact and slightly shallow breathing and that familiar feeling of fascination and legitimately _tangible_ discomfort as far as the eye can see. In the yellow corner, we have James Kirk – **eighteen years-old**, exactly **six feet tall** and **165 pounds**, a specimen of pure inelegance and tactlessness. In the blue, there is Spock – **nineteen**, **six-foot-two** and **166 pounds **of careful, cool elegance and startlingly clear acuity. They've seen way too much of each other to be so speechless, wouldn't you say?

Spock's voice is loud and jarring in the stillness of the room when he asks, "Will that be all?" (He doesn't know just how much he hopes that the answer is _no_.)

That is the instant when, of all times, Jim remembers how to laugh. He does it, _laughs_, because this situation is actually kind of funny – the two of them face-to-face after all their time spent sharing glances intended to be surreptitious and silently wondering at each other and they're both at a complete loss for words – and isn't it amazing what a bit of laughter will do for your nerves?

The look that comes over Spock's face then only amplifies Jim's amusement – one of his brows angling upwards, his dark, intense eyes narrowing a little. It's an expression of curiosity Jim will come to fall in love with very, _very_ soon, but for now, it just tickles him a whole fucking lot.

"We got off to a really shitty start, didn't we?" he asks, chuckling as he runs a hand through his sandy hair. He feels something akin to _triumph_ when a whisper of a smile plays upon Spock's lips in response, some good old-fashioned _emotion_ on that marble visage.

"I would say so," is his reply, acknowledging, amused – a wholesale _agreement_. They're breathing a little better at this point, the tension lining their shoulders steadily evaporating without either of them really noticing, _both_ of them – I can promise you that – feeling incredibly silly.

"Would it be –" Jim cuts himself off, self-conscious for all of a **half-second**, before deliberately deciding it would be a lot more beneficial to the two of them if he just cut it the fuck out with that as soon as possible. "Would it be too awkward if I said I wanted us to be friends?" Because that _is_ what he wants, right? And this whole visit is about what he wants, _right?_

This weird, half-astonished, half-relieved sort of light dashes across Spock's face, lingering in his eyes long after it's left his expression. There's more inflection in his voice than Jim's ever heard – it's still not that much, but it's evident – when he says, "Not at all."

And he sounds _grateful_, really, as grateful as he can manage without betraying himself too much. He sounds soothed, too. He sounds _happy_, is what Jim realizes after **a week and a half **of replaying those three words in his head, when he's much more familiar with Spock's quirks and he's learned how to read him better.

Jim is astonished to find that **two hours **later, he's _still_ sitting in Spock's apartment, engaged in a lengthy, remarkably enthusiastic conversation with the man about astrophysics, Greek mythology, American geography, and _Final Fantasy_, among other things, and as they make variations of the same faces at each other – pleasantly surprised faces and comically confused faces and impossibly intrigued faces and all the indescribable faces shaded in between, Spock's expressions always several degrees _less_ than Jim's – Jim _learns_.

Some things snooping around Spock's apartment would have never told him:

- Spock's IQ is **189**, to be precise (and again, Jim's very eloquent response to that is a shocked, gasping, '_no fucking way_').

- In his spare time, he likes to play video games, watch documentaries, research ancient civilizations, study rocket science and economic trends (which Jim discovers really aren't all that different in a concrete sense), and cook.

- His favorite color is _white –_ _not_ blue like Jim was so sure it was.

- He became friends with Uhura because he was _tutoring_ her (as opposed to trying to _date_ her), and he will continue to tutor her until the end of the semester.

- His eyes are a dark, chocolatey brown that Jim easily mistook for black while looking at him from the long distances and for the short timespans that he was before.

- His favorite novel is – just like Jim's – _1984_. Honorable mentions include: _Slaughterhouse-Five_, _The Great Gatsby_, _Into the Wild_, and _The Life of Pi_ (all of which are books Jim has a secret infatuation for as well).

- He has never seen _The Rocky Horror Picture Show_, _Donnie Darko_, _The Bodyguard_, _Gone With the Wind_, any of _The Godfather_ films, _Pulp Fiction_, _The Breakfast Club_, _The Big Lebowski_, _Ghostbusters_, and many, many other assorted cult and classic pictures. He has, however, watched all of the _Star Wars _saga, _Blade Runner_, and _Tron_, and he has a rather peculiar predilection for _The Wizard of Oz _and _The King and I_.

- He has a preoccupation with logic the likes of which Jim has never seen.

- He knows even _more_ languages than Uhura does – **_thirteen_**, in fact – and all of them he can speak fluently.

- He is double-majoring in physical science and mathematics, and he plans to be an astrophysicist after he's earned his PhD.

- He is, in all probability, the most interesting person Jim has ever met in his life.

On **Tuesday, September 3****rd**, Jim texts Spock as he's walking back to his dorm from the cafeteria with McCoy, something totally trivial and arbitrary that just happened to go flying through his head:

**[txt]:** _How do u say pigeon in japanese?_

He lets out a short, amused laugh when he sees the man's response. McCoy shoots him a quick, scrutinizing look.

**[txt]: **_You realize that the Japanese language utilizes an alphabet I do not have the keyboard for on my cellular phone, don't you?_

**[txt]: **_U could spell it phoentically yknow lol_

Jim gets distracted by something McCoy says, a comment about the quality of the instant coffee they grabbed on their way out of the cafeteria, and they end up bantering about it all the way up to their apartment – "_They don't have time for you and your fetish for home-grown coffee beans, man_." "_Yeah, well they will after I file a complaint._" "_About what? Cheap, affordable coffee that just happens to be inappropriate for your oh-so cultured palate?_" – so he doesn't see Spock's message until after he's kicked back on the couch with his sneakers off and his hoodie rolled up to expose his stomach, modesty be damned.

**[txt]:** _Hato._

Later, while Sulu is taking his time to pick a character in _Mortal Kombat_, Jim asks,

**[txt]: **_What about in russian?_

**[txt]: **_I was under the impression that you have a Russian roommate._

It is at that point that Jim becomes very familiar with Spock's inability to say anything without some – usually quite sizable – degree of sass. He's _thrilled _by this revelation, to say the least.

**[txt]: **_Humor me, Spock :^)_

Sulu is quite vocally celebrating the fatality his _Sub-Zero_ has dealt Jim's _Raiden_ – he even starts singing a decidedly melodious rendition of _Beez In the Trap_ and swinging his controller around like a lasso in the wake of his success – when Jim checks his phone, shaking his head in both amusement and shame.

**[txt]:** _Golubok_.

Of course, then Jim is falling back against the sofa and laughing his poor head off as he watches Sulu dance Chekov around the coffee table, warbling on, "_Bitch, I spit that crack, like I'm in that trap, so if you need a hit, then I'm with that bat..._", and the rest of the night is spent watching _Jersey Shore _reruns and eating cold pizza from the day before, but by the time McCoy is dragging Jim off to bed at **fourteen minutes** past **midnight**, Spock has taught him how to say the words _pigeon_, _grenade_, and _star_ in about **a fourth** of the languages he knows how to speak.

On **Wednesday, September 4****th**, Jim, Chekov, and Uhura run into Spock and – much to Jim's surprise and satisfaction – _Scott_ in the quad after English, and almost immediately, they fall into the same easy camaraderie they shared at the party, this time without help from any copious amounts of alcohol or the relatively uninhibited ambiance of last **Saturday** night.

"Y'know, I still contend tha' you could make quite a livin' as a dancer, my boy," Scott jests as they sit around one of the wrought iron tables spaced out all over the quad. "Tha' performance of yours was something I will never forget." His default expression of impish delight intensifies at the blush that immediately rises in Chekov's cheeks, the teen unable to stop himself from hiding the lower half of his face with the cuff of his sleeve in his sheepishness.

"Yeah, why'd you come all the way to Uppercrust University when you could be making good money without having to worry about making the grade, huh?" Jim plays along because he likes Scott a whole fucking lot and he likes seeing Chekov fluster nearly just as much. Scott laughs something sharp and amused, slaps a quick hand against his knee.

"This kid is a fuckin' trip, isn't he?" he chuckles, wagging his index finger in Jim's general direction. The query is mostly aimed at Spock, who does that thing he likes to do where he's not quite smiling but you can sort of tell he's in agreement – or pleased, or intrigued, or whatever sentiment just so happens to apply to the situation – simply by paying attention to which muscles shift in his face and how. It makes Jim smile to watch it happen, that small unfolding of feeling on his face, like a little victory being played out before him (even if he wasn't the one who won it).

"He came here to find _us_," Uhura says in response to the teasing, playful question Jim fielded at Chekov, says it in that semi-casual, profoundly perfect way she possesses so easily. The words roll like two river stones onto the table, settle at the center of it without rattling too much – heavy, comforting. Like warm honey in the pit of their shared stomach.

And the look on Chekov's face is _beautiful_.

They all chill out beneath the September sun – talking, joking, Jim and Chekov complaining about their professors while Scott and Spock laugh and scoff at them as much as their greater experience allows, Uhura giving the whole table an in-depth lesson on astrology (Chekov learns that he is a Pisces, Scott a Gemini, Jim and Spock – whose birthdays turn out to be only **_four days_**apart, _wow_ – both Aries), Scott easily becoming '_Scotty_' to Jim and Spock and Chekov carrying on a brief conversation in Russian when Jim asks them to – until Uhura announces that she has to leave so she can start getting ready for work, laughing, "If I spill diner food on this dress and these shoes," – she kicks her leg out for emphasis, showing off the pristine white pumps she's clad in – "I'd never forgive myself."

She leaves a light, affectionate kiss on Spock's right temple just before she goes. The muscles in his face shift again – another one of his not-smiles.

And as they're getting to their feet to start setting off in separate directions – Scott to his dorm so he can '_study and drink responsibly_,' in his own words, Chekov to the library in pursuit of some art books to check out, Jim to his truck so he can head to work himself, Spock to Lord _knows_ where – Jim's mouth does what it does best and outruns his mind.

"You know she's in love with you, right?" He says it before he can think the words through, before he can realize how much weight is actually behind them, how much he truly believes them, and in the instant after they've left him, Jim sort of-kind of hates himself for letting them escape (but only for that single instant – not a second before or after).

Spock goes still – an odd sight, bearing in mind that he's always relatively motionless – and looks at Jim without heat, without curiosity, without anything but quiet consideration. When he replies, it is only with two soft, solemn words.

"I know."

A confirmation.

Jim doesn't ask Spock if he loves her back, doesn't try to make a conversation out of it. He just walks with him until their paths are forced to diverge some **ten yards** from his dormitory's parking lot, then gives him a quick pat on the back and a parting wave devoid of any of the discomfort he'd thought it would have. Spock returns the gesture in the awkward, muted way he has.

On his drive to the auto shop, Jim reminds himself to pick up a pack of blank DVDs from Office Depot before he heads back home.

It is **5:23 PM** on **Thursday, September 5****th** and Jim has just finished his **twenty-page** essay on symbolism in American literature (with an extraordinarily long, extraordinarily _relieved_ sigh, might I add) when he snatches his phone off of the nightstand and sends a message Spock's way.

**[txt]:** _Are u free rn?_

The apartment is unsettlingly quiet, what with Sulu still at work and McCoy and Chekov off looking for lightbulbs and toothpaste or something at Wal-Mart, and Jim is hungry, lonely, and in need of some sort of congratulations for his incredible feat of academic perseverance. His phone vibrates on McCoy's desktop as he's hooking his laptop up to the man's printer, blindly feeling at the vacant USB ports all along the back of the device.

**[txt]:** _I am. Why do you ask?_

**[txt]:** _U wanna grab some dinner?_

The **seventh** page of his essay creeps out of the printer before he gets a response.

**[txt]:** _I believe that would be enjoyable. What sort of establishment did you have in mind?_

Jim decides right then and there that he will _never_ be over Spock's peculiar diction.

**Fifteen minutes** later, he's meeting Spock in the parking lot with only his phone and a **twenty dollar **bill in his back pocket. It's the first time he's ever seen the man's car – a sleek, most likely _very_ expensive (as in, the most expensive thing Jim has ever been in the presence of in all his **eighteen years**) Volvo that looks like it's been driven straight out of a car commercial and directly into the bizarre thing that is his life at this point – and he slides into the passenger's seat like he's Cinderella and this is his magical pumpkin carriage, ready to whisk him off to the ball that is greasy diner food and charming retro music (quite a ball indeed, in his humble opinion).

"_Man_, what was the price tag on this sucker like?" he asks before even thinking to say hello. _Shit_, the surround sound in here is _ridiculous_.

Spock turns the music volume down in one second and shifts the car into reverse in the next, his cheek twitching almost imperceptibly. "Extravagant," is his simple, concise reply.

Jim lets out a low whistle as they practically _glide_ on out of the parking lot, smooth and silent like he's only ever _heard_ of vehicles being before. He's struck with the same sort of feeling he had when he visited Spock's apartment on **Monday**, this shrinking sensation of being suddenly, fantastically small and base and lame in comparison to Spock, who is basically pure, condensed _excellence_ in one nice, pretty human package.

That feeling allays, though, when Spock glances over at him and says, "I recall you saying you were partial to New Order," effectively drawing his attention away from the mere quality of the sound system and to the actual song playing – an old favorite of his.

And in that moment, Jim discovers that not only is he fascinated by the man on his left – he _likes_ him, too.

The place is called _Enterprise_ and is styled after the quintessential **70's** diner – all neon lights and checkered flooring and Norman Rockwell prints decorating the walls. Jim and Spock steal the table in the back – a huge booth that wraps around the whole rear left corner of the restaurant – mostly because Jim wants to stretch out and kick his feet up on the cushion across from him.

"Your choice of seating is a bit inconsiderate, don't you think?" Spock comments, watching Jim like one would a bird-of-paradise or a circus performance, this borderline _hysterical _look of intrigue splayed out across his features. Jim shrugs puckishly.

"It's a habit." Young and reckless as he is at this point, he's anything if not self-aware. Thoughtlessly, he reaches over, pokes Spock's bicep – which is surprisingly firm, by the way, him being King of the Nerds and all – and says, referring to his impossibly straight posture, "You gotta ramrod stuck up there or something?"

Spock flinches a bit at Jim's touch, slightly taken aback. "Does my carriage offend you?"

Jim laughs openly at the inquiry, tickled. "_God_, no." He levels a warm, amused smirk at Spock. "I just think it's a little funny, s'all."

Spock's face does something interesting, nearly indescribable when he says that – his eyes blinking, his brow flattening. There's almost no change in his expression at all, and yet Jim can see everything in the world _shift_ in his face, like tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor (in the sense that he definitely knows they're there, but can he honestly say he's ever seen one _move?_).

Then he says, "We are not very much alike, are we." And it's not a question, nor is it a criticism, and the responding smile that flowers across Jim's face is neither an agreement nor a denial.

Uhura looks nothing short of _enchanted_ when she makes her way over to their table, flopping **two** shiny, laminated menus down in front of them and humming, "Well, well, well. If it isn't two of my favorite people in the world."

"Please tell me you're going to be our server," Jim says. "Because that would just make my entire night."

"I will be for..." She brings her left wrist up for **a second or two** to consult her watch. "The next fourteen minutes or so. Then I'll be free as a bird."

"You should join us after your shift's over." Jim momentarily glances at Spock, stupidly expecting to gauge his reaction to the invitation (which, of course, is impossible to do).

"I'll consider it," Uhura teases with a grin. All Jim hears is '_yes, thank you, I'd be delighted to_'. She fishes her little notepad out of one of the pockets in her waist apron, asks, "What can I get you guys to drink?"

Soon, Uhura is bringing Jim and Spock a Samuel Adams and a tall bottle of root beer, respectively, the two of them are ordering their food, and their conversation starts to err on the science-fiction side of things – namely, _Star Wars_.

"I always thought that that Sith Lord – shit, I can't think of his name – like, manipulated the Force or whatever and magically inseminated Shmi, and then _bam_ –" Jim slaps the tabletop for emphasis. "Anakin popped right on out of her womb."

"Darth Plagueis," Spock supplies helpfully, belatedly.

"_That's_ him," Jim exalts, failing to curb his urge to touch Spock again and giving the man an amiable smack on the forearm. "Thank you."

Spock doesn't recoil from him this time, instead simply continues to speak in just as even a tone as ever. "Darth Plagueis attempted to... exert dominance over all the midi-chlorians in the galaxy, but the Force resisted his efforts. In response to that such struggle, the midi-chlorians acted of their own accord and conceived Anakin with Shmi." Once he becomes aware of the vaguely bewildered look Jim is aiming at him, he adds, "I've researched this."

It pleases Jim like almost nothing else in this universe that he is now not the only person he knows that studies all the arbitrary things that just so happen to interest him. So they aren't so different after all.

"Isn't that basically what I just said?" he says without heat, grinning without really meaning to.

"Not quite." The corner of Spock's mouth twitches **a millimeter** upwards – a genuine _smirk_. "Details and such."

Jim mirrors Spock's expression, amplifies it, then takes a drag from his beer and asks, "So, are you telling me that Anakin is basically Star Wars-Jesus?"

Spock raises a brow. "Well, there are certainly many Christian allegories underlining all of the Star Wars saga."

Uhura comes around with Jim's burger, Spock's chicken tenders, and their bills sometime after Spock has begun illustrating the similarities and differences between Anakin, Luke, and Jesus Christ and right before Jim starts bitching about the discrepancies embedded his comparison.

"Luke totally couldn't be Jesus, though," is what he's saying as Uhura is dropping his check on the space beside his plate. "According to the Bible, Jesus is supposed to come back at the end of time and save everyone, which is _exactly_ what Anakin did at the end of the last movie."

"Your logic is flawed, James," Spock comments, barely even batting an eyelid. "Christ didn't fall to the Devil's temptations. However, Anakin _did_." He digs his wallet out of the pocket of his jacket where it's neatly folded on the booth beside him, retrieving his credit card as he fills out his bill. "His story is more analogous to that of the Prodigal Son than it is to that of Jesus."

Jim is too busy chowing down on the **_ten_** French fries in his mouth to reply immediately. During his food-induced silence, Uhura purrs, mostly playfully, "Leave me a big fat tip, will you?"

Spock makes a brief, humming noise in his throat. "Of course, Nyota." The look on his face is tinged with warmth as he hands his bill back to her, his movements colored with a nearly imperceptible tenderness that's only apparent because he's so clinical almost all of the time. A knot begins to form somewhere near Jim's diaphragm.

It's the second throwback of the day, and this time, Jim feels distinctly as he did when he was watching Spock and Uhura dance at the party, and even a whisper of what he felt yesterday after that awful, awkward thing he said to Spock. It isn't jealousy. It isn't discomfort. It's the knowledge that Uhura definitely loves Spock and that Spock is _better_ than him in her eyes and the fact that he's never been good at feeling inadequate and that he loves Uhura and that Spock is more captivating than anything he's ever encountered before and that his feelings change every time his vantage point does and that he _knows_ all this and he isn't exactly sure how to accept it in a global, all-encompassing sense. The individual pieces of the puzzle are easy enough for him to deal with; it's when he steps back and takes a look at the big picture that he starts pissing himself off.

His meal costs **twelve dollars** and **seventy-four cents**, including tax. He lets Uhura have the rest of his **twenty** for her tip.

"Oh!" Uhura turns to Jim abruptly as though remembering herself, having already started towards the cash register. Her expression is bright and pleased when she says, "Sulu told me to tell you '_hi_,' that he hopes you like your burger, and that he's going to be off in a few minutes as well."

Jim can't rein in the smile begging for supremacy over his features (not that he wants to all that much, mind you). "Roger that," he jests, giving Uhura a mock-salute and a wink.

And after she's gotten a good distance away, he turns back to Spock, steals a chicken finger from his plate, and says, "_I_ think Luke is an allegory for Moses." He tears a strip of meat from the fillet, drops it quite theatrically into his mouth. "But that wouldn't exactly be Christian, would it?"

Spock snorts quietly, looking only subliminally affronted at Jim's unabashed theft of his food. "It wouldn't be," he concurs.

It isn't long before Uhura and Sulu have joined them – Uhura taking a seat next to Spock with her own plate of chicken tenders and Sulu beside Jim with a bowl of chili-cheese fries (that Jim immediately takes it upon himself to snack on as well) – and Jim has sent out a group text to McCoy, Chekov, and Scott, simply reading: _GO TO ENTERPRISE NOW_.

Scott is the first one to show up – slightly drunk, by the look and sound of it – with McCoy and Chekov arriving only **six minutes** after him. The conversation evolves as their group grows – once Uhura and Sulu have entered the discussion, Jim and Spock's extended analysis of _Star Wars_ turns into a deliberation on the arbitrary, day-to-day elements that never seem to be explained in works of fiction ("_Like, do you ever think about what kind of food they eat everyday? What's Yoda's diet like? Were Ewoks considered game at one point? And what about bathroom facilities?_"), which in turn becomes a discourse about all the shitty pornos parodying famous movies and comic books Scott has ever nearly killed himself laughing at, which _then_ develops into an amazingly heated conversation about The Best and Worst sexual encounters they've undergone (a discussion Spock and Chekov both elect to dismiss themselves from out of a sense of dignity and a simple lack of experience, respectively), and then desirable traits in a significant other, and then how animal instinct plays into human courtship, and so on and so forth.

"You cannot honestly expect me to believe that physical attraction has no meaning to you. That just... that doesn't make any sense." Jim glances at Spock, nudges him briefly with his elbow. "Am I right or am I right?"

Spock cocks one of his eyebrows again, something that sort of looks like accord, but he doesn't respond verbally (Jim's not entirely sure whether it's a matter of him not being able to reply or him simply choosing not to) when McCoy is saying, "It's possible, Jim. Love ain't necessarily logical, you know."

"_Exactly_," Uhura agrees with fervor. "Why do you think there are so many stories of thrilling, heartwrenching romance out there?"

"_Fictional_ stories," Jim retorts, eliciting a dismissive scoff out of McCoy and a protest from Uhura – "_Oh, don't be such a cynic_," she says – and he throws his hands up defensively before either of them can argue with him further, adds, "I'm not saying I don't _believe in love_," – his voice goes high and campy when he says that – "I'm just disagreeing with your claim that you could fall in love with someone without being attracted to them. I mean, what would even make you pursue them in the first place unless you were digging them?"

"Circumstance," Uhura replies. Sulu and McCoy mutter their agreement as she goes on, "There are all kinds of situations you could end up sharing with other people and find yourself falling for them."

"You could spend years growing up with someone and fall in love with them," Sulu says. "Or you could end up falling in love with someone you used to consider just a friend."

"Yeah, but that's not the point in question." Jim's tone is both laughing and frustrated, his hands going up to briefly catch against his hair. "That's all well and good, but it doesn't necessarily account for the initial '_oh, I think they're pretty hot_,' that makes you go for them at all. Without that, what would honestly compel you to start dating them?"

"Yer forgettin' that attraction ain't strictly physical," McCoy says, murmuring a quick _thank you_ to the waitress bringing him a fresh bottle of beer.

"You can fall in love with someone's personality before you fall in love with their body," Uhura puts in.

"What are the chances of you _seeing_ their personality before you see their body, though?" Jim throws back. "Like, I can get... slowly convincing yourself that someone's hot after you spend awhile getting into them as a person, but without sex, what's the point?"

"In saying that, you're invalidating the legitimacy of chaste romantic relationships, which are just as sound as sexual ones," Spock coolly points out, the first time he's spoken in what seems like an eternity. Both Uhura and Sulu start unironically applauding him, then – an act to which he simply nods his head appreciatively – while Jim finds himself unable to come up with a suitable argument against his very, _very_ valid point. It's the second debate he's lost to the man tonight, and yet he doesn't feel defeated in the slightest.

"You got me," he sighs, leaning back against his seat in his failure. "I officially concede this argument to Team True Love."

"Y'know, all of you have good points, though," Scott pipes in. "I' just depends on the person." He motions to Uhura and McCoy on either side of him with his beer bottle. "You're allowed to value personality over looks, just like _you_," he gestures to Jim this time, "You're allowed to le' physical attraction take the reins first." His shoulders bunch upwards in a quick shrug. "I's a free country, so long as you're not imposin' your opinions on everyone else."

A collective hum of agreement settles over the table, effortlessly sucking the tension of the debate out of all seven of them sitting there.

"Personally, all tha' '_heartwrenching romance_' stuff isn't for me," Scott adds, smiling when Uhura playfully rolls her eyes and scoffs at him. "Bu' I'm not rulin' it out as a possibility." His eyes land on Chekov – who's been speechless throughout the entirety of this discussion, preferring to simply listen rather than to contribute – and something in his expression turns inquisitive. "What d'_you_ think, kid?"

Everyone turns their gazes onto Chekov, who quickly starts squirming uncomfortably under the scrutiny. He nervously glances from his plate to Scott, then to Uhura, then to Sulu, and then back to his plate, toying briefly with a French fry before saying, "I zink zat... anyzhing could happen, really." He briefly clears his throat, strengthening his voice. "Zere is no method to falling in love."

It's the wisest thing anyone has said since the onset of the conversation. Chekov has a way of being startlingly, breathtakingly brilliant like that.

They all spend the next **fifteen minutes** or so listening to the tale of how Chekov's parents met and fell in together – his mother a wealthy, aristocratic heiress from St. Petersburg, his father a lower class factory worker from Taganrog. It's a story of many struggles, many break-ups and reunions and familial conflicts and everything you'd expect to hear in an old storybook or an epic romance film, but it's _real_ and, more than anything, it simultaneously proves everyone at the table both right _and_ wrong.

"Mama used to tell me zat sometimes, she would catch herself zinking Papa was so _ugly_," he says at one point. "She would ask herself how she could love someone as grizzly and hard and... _scarred_ as him. And Papa too used to question why he loved Mama when he zhought her so unbearable at times – she could be very critical and proud, you know." He lets out a soft, bittersweet little laugh – a tiny hint of affection. "But eventually, zhey stopped trying to explain it to zhemselves. Zhey kept coming back to each ozher for a reason, right?"

Nobody can manage a verbal response; there are only soft, hushed hums of acknowledgment all around the table, these twenty-first century romantics awed into reverent, wondering silence. Spock seems especially pensive when Jim sneaks a glance at him in his periphery – his dark, solemn eyes cast downward, his brow faintly creased with thought. It's a soulful wistfulness so different from the careful calculation Jim is accustomed to seeing on his face – he doesn't know why noticing it makes him so suddenly sad.

It's **8:32** when the group departs from _Enterprise_ – a whole **two hours** spent talking into the night – Uhura passing goodnight hugs and kisses all around, Sulu leading Chekov back to his car with an arm slung around his shoulder, Scott saluting the group through the window of his Passat, Jim deciding to ride back to campus with Bones to save Spock the trouble of driving him to his dorm. He thanks him for the company right before he can disappear silently, inconspicuously into his car, thanks him over the roof of McCoy's Accord and across the empty parking space between them, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

Spock pauses, his hand on the door of his perfect fairytale Volvo, and replies, "Thank _you_, James."

Jim gives him a quick wink and a smirk. "Call me Jim."

And on **Friday, September 6****th**, Jim shows up, totally unannounced, on the doorstep of Apartment **E09** at approximately **7:02 PM**, having recently come to the conclusion that it is his mission in life to educate his new friend in the world of classic and cult films as best as he's able to and armed with a **six**-pack of Corona, a bag of Cheeto Puffs, and _The Big Lebowski_ burned to a DVD-RW to help him do the job. The look Spock gives him when he opens the door and sees him standing on the other side is a sight – barely suppressed surprise and his own peculiar brand of curiosity, his arching eyebrows still the most expressive thing on his marble face.

"James?" He cracks the door open further despite his confusion. "I was not aware that you were planning to visit."

Jim flashes him a smile, not really all that sheepish. "Are you busy?"

Spock hesitates, watching him with that dark, impenetrable stare of his. "... no, howe–"

"Then step aside and prepare to have your pop cultural horizons broadened significantly, my friend," Jim cuts him off, satisfied with all he's heard. He deliberately bumps Spock's shoulder with his own as he slides past him through the doorway, laughs, "And didn't I tell you to call me Jim?"

Spock closes the door slowly and carefully after Jim's inside, visibly bewildered by his boldness, while Jim wastes no time in making himself at home, immediately dropping the Cheetos onto the coffee table and ducking into the kitchen to store the **six**-pack on the bottom shelf of Spock's refrigerator – making sure to come away with two bottles when he does – before he's strutting back into the living room, grabbing his DVD, and gesturing it expansively in the general direction of the television.

"Can you hook us up?" he asks, just as casual as can be.

Spock, who is still standing a bit uncomfortably by the door, all stiff and noticeably uncertain (which, for the record, might be the greatest thing Jim has ever beheld in his _life_, considering Spock's default behavior), takes a moment or two to reply. "I was watching that," he says.

When Jim turns to the TV and discerns the program that's on – a documentary about the Wall Street Crash of **1929**, to be exact – this unusual hybrid of shame and amusement roils up in his gut, more ticklish than unpleasant. He regards Spock with something like mischief coloring his expression, briefly waving his DVD in the air as he says, "We'll finish your documentary if you promise we can watch this right afterwards. Deal?"

And it never occurs to him until nearly **a month** later just how much he's intruding on this man's life, so much more than anyone else has ever before. It never occurs to him how his actions tonight will affect their relationships with themselves and with each other for almost all of the foreseeable future. Right now, all that matters to him is the TV in front of them, the movie in his hand, and the look on Spock's face, which is – rather amazingly – just beginning to thaw.

"That is..." Spock considers his words carefully, observing Jim somewhat intensely for all of **three seconds**. "An agreeable arrangement."

Jim may or may not give a little _whoop _at that. Oh, well. Only Spock will ever know.

(A small note: That's more than alright with Jim.)

For the next **twenty-six minutes**, Jim and Spock kick back on Spock's immaculate suede sofa in front of the Discovery Channel, then spend the following **two hours** watching _The Big Lebowski_ on his PlayStation 3. Jim drinks a total of **three** bottles of Corona as opposed to the meager **six ounces** Spock consumes (he's not huge beer guy, Jim learns), the vast majority of the Cheetos end up in _his_ stomach instead of Spock's (not that either of them mind), and for the better part of the movie, he has a good old time laughing his ass off at all the zingers he's loved since the first time he saw it while Spock just sits beside him and looks _pained_.

"I do not understand the premise of this film," he says about **three-fourths** of the way through it, his eyes narrowed and scrutinizing as they stay glued to the screen. "It is... utterly illogical."

"Of course it is," Jim chuckles warmly around the neck of his beer bottle, impossibly amused with Spock's earnest use of the word '_utterly_'. "It's not supposed to have a premise."

"Why then is it worth watching?" Spock asks without averting his gaze. The way he voices the question isn't necessarily cutting or spiteful or anything like that – just really, _really_ blunt – and honestly, it puts a smile on Jim's face.

"Well, there's comedic value to consider," he replies thoughtfully, watching as Spock's brow furrows in mystification with something a whole lot like _glee_. "Not to mention the compelling characters, brilliant one-liners, and various pot and drinking references."

Spock blinks, unsmiling. "I am not sure how recreational drug use and moronic behavior makes a character '_compelling_', but I suppose I will take your word for it."

The laugh that comes out of Jim then is hearty and candid, leaves him pleasantly winded and slouching heavily against the back of the couch. Spock's mouth twitches at the corner, unnoticeable in the darkness of the room.

And later, after they're through with the movie and Jim is sort of helping Spock empty his dishwasher in exchange for his ear (which he's diligently filling with his expertise and knowledge as an ongoing cinephile), he catches himself saying, "You wouldn't believe how much you shocked me when you told me you hadn't seen _any_ of those movies."

"I would, and I do," is Spock's even reply. He carefully lifts a stack of porcelain plates into the cabinet above the stove, almost pantherlike in his grace.

Jim clumsily relocates one stray shiny steel fork from the spoon tray to its rightful home. "I mean, were you raised on a different planet or something?" he teases, smirking at the brief, vaguely slighted look Spock shoots him in response.

"James, where you come from..." Spock pauses, smoothly crossing the floor to where Jim is snatching a slightly damp glass from the dishwasher. His voice drops half an octave or so as he retrieves a pristine white coffee mug to shelve, as he finishes his sentence with a quiet, meditative, "I might as well have been."

The air stills around them; Jim can feel it when it settles. He meets Spock's gaze without an inkling of fear across the dishwasher door, says, "You don't say, huh?"

He doesn't even know the half of it.

* * *

Spock was born on **March 26****th****, 1994** at **1:01 AM **in New York, New York to a man named Sarek and a woman called Amanda. He weighed **6 pounds**, **2 ounces** – only slightly underweight. He came into the world quietly, painlessly, and with a head full of dark, downy hair.

The difficulties Spock was to experience for the next **eighteen years** of his life preceded him greatly, so greatly that none of them – not his father, his mother, the sea of relatives between them nor himself – should have ever been surprised. And they weren't, for the most part. Everything just seemed so much more hopeful on that beautiful day in the hospital, when Amanda held her newborn son in her arms and he was nothing but a bright-eyed baby boy – not a _freak_, not _retarded_, not a _mule_ or a _kike_ or any of the varied and assorted things he would turn into in the years to come. Nothing but a baby boy.

His father came from a large, immensely wealthy Jewish family steadily growing roots into the law and medical industries for **sixty years** now, you see. They were all Conservative Jews (a term that has no political connotations, mind you), some of the elders even Holocaust survivors. They adhered to the _Halakha_, they observed the _Shabbat_; they kept kosher and blessed their wine and never took the Lord's name in vain. A tight-knit dynasty of halcyon princes and queens with sable eyes and sable tresses quietly embedded in the face of Brooklyn.

Nearly **nine miles** north on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Spock's mother grew up the daughter of a white, Protestant woman and an Iranian, Muslim man, grew up an olive-skinned working-class girl with dreams of becoming an actress or a singer or anything brilliant and shining and great. Her relatives were few and far between – a far cry from Sarek's expansive, upper-class kin.

They met – in typical New York fashion – on a crowded subway platform. Both had just barely missed the **5:00** train. They talked, they laughed, they shared a cab back into the city, shared phone numbers, shared smiles. It wasn't long before they were falling in love and into a world of trouble.

Their betrothal produced much strife: a wholesale lack of acceptance of Amanda on the part of Sarek's family, an exceedingly violent clash of cultures – the Jewish and the Muslim – Sarek's stark objectivity and sternness in constant conflict with Amanda's sunshiney radiance and warmth, and all the confusion and discord that came from growing up in entirely different worlds, the glue of New York City be damned. A bystander could feasibly argue that the only truly magnificent thing that came of their union – save for the act of joining itself – was the boy. The boy who flourished in a garden thick with trouble. The boy who always lived in two pieces of himself. The boy with eyes like the Jerusalem night – abysmal, luminous.

Spock and his parents lived in a pretty Brooklyn brownstone with a faded white door. Up the cement steps and into the extravagant foyer, he would count the pictures on the wall and each wooden plank in the floor, then in the kitchen, he'd help his mother make the _matzoh_ or watch the city outside through the tall window by the counter – **one** black cat disappearing into the shrubbery across the street, **four** women saddled with _Gucci_ bags flouncing down the sidewalk, **two **cardinals preening their scarlet feathers in the tree just to the right of him. From the window, he would carefully climb the stairs and slip into his father's study to read the tomes lining the walls – books with titles like _The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy_ and _The Legal Environment of Business_ and _The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx_ – then wander on to his room, where he would practice the cello or flick through the dictionary or study the map of New York pinned to the wall above his bed, **three** out of the **five** boroughs already seared into his brain. He awoke every morning at **6:00**, ate breakfast at **6:15**, went on daily walks with his mother to school or the park – depending on which day of the week it was – at **6:30**. Lunch was invariably at **midday**, then snacks after **3:00**, then a lesson or two spaced out during the afternoon – piano or Italian or tap dancing or any number of the artistic, cultured things his father so desired – and dinner at **7:00**. After **two hours** of rest – **two hours** usually spent completing schoolwork or reading – he would retire at **9:00**, sleep soundly until it was time for him to start the cycle over again. His life was a meticulously regimented ritual. There was no time for such trivial things as play.

His mother fancied herself with holding his hand and mussing his hair and imparting her knowledge of both Jewish and Islamic cuisine on him. She taught him how to smile, to see, to appreciate and breathe and listen very closely. She ensured he went to bed every night with at least **one** thing to be pleased about. She never failed to remind him just how she felt about him (in three short, entirely too common words).

Conversely, his father kept him ever on his toes, forged him into a sterling silver superboy armed with endless aptitude and the finest of armor. He was a man of astronomical standards and indomitable expectations – '_make that grade_' and '_waste no time_' and '_stand up straighter_' and '_be a good Jew_'. There was no smiling or breathing with this man. Not a hair was to be out of place, not a word misspoken.

His father's family was a constant presence in his life and home, always filling the halls with talk of business and faith and the economy and, of course, the weather. They so loved to comment on Spock's resemblance to Sarek – the same ears, the same nose, the same hair and the shape of his lips. They never seemed to notice his mother's eyes staring at them through his wide sockets, or his mother's brow sitting straight upon his forehead, or his mother's square jaws or his mother's high cheeks or his mother's olive skin, hiding beneath the translucent Ashkenazi curtain he's been shrouded in since the day he was born. They never seemed to notice his mother _anywhere_, honestly, but most especially never in him.

Spock never knew his maternal grandparents, only the numerous softspoken, darkly intelligent Jews of Sarek's blood. They marveled at the industry of his mind, at his talents and his calm disposition, but they always did so as if they were so _surprised_, as if a boy of his tainted pedigree was never supposed to succeed as he did.

From the ages of **five** to **fourteen**, Spock attended the Ariel Vandenburg School of Manhattan, where his every achievement was something remarkable and unforeseen and the teachers spoke in Hebrew just as much as they did English. There, God's chosen people would wrestle with him in the mud of the courtyard and call him and his mother awful, ugly names – '_mule_' and '_half-breed_' and '_raghead_' – and he would arrive home beaten and bruised, Jewish blood seeping from the cracks in his lips. The abuse didn't cease when he transferred to the Brooklyn College Academy, because there, not only was he a '_dirty Muslim_' and a '_mutt_', but a '_kike_' as well. It's a wonder, really, the lengths people will go to tell you what you are.

The boy with the oil lamp eyes was much more than this, however.

- Spock had a habit of staring too long or not looking at all, often to the irritation and confusion of those around him. He found it extremely difficult to understand the subtle nuances in others' speech, often tuned out of conversations that held no interest for him, and much preferred to spend his time alone than preoccupy himself with something as petty and bewildering as human interaction.

- He was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome at the age of **eight**.

- He had an odd manner about him, a too-straight spine and no tone to his voice and an eternally wandering mind, his thoughts many times too fast and frequent for him to hold onto all at once.

- He was using words like '_beckon_' and _'aplomb_' and '_plethora_' long before most children his age would. He could read at a college level before he entered the **fourth** grade, and he possessed the rare gift of eidetic memory. He knew the name of every street in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens by heart. By the time his **fourteenth** birthday rolled around, he was a certified genius.

- There was a certain something about learning and looking that always had him alight with fever, a curiosity forever coded in his DNA, demanding answers for all the endless questions the world would fill his head with. He wasn't very fond of school, what with its slowness and stagnation and the meaningless cruelty he'd endure there, but if there was one thing he never tired of, it was the pursuit of knowledge.

- Spock found solace in the concrete, unchanging nature of numbers and patterns, calculus, _time_ – the workings of the world around him and the positions of the stars in relation to the Earth and complicated chemical equations – _**CaCl**__**2**__**(aq) + 2AgNO**__**3**__**(aq) → Ca(NO**__**3**__**)**__**2**__**(aq) + 2AgCl(s)**_ – and the effect of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds and the exact distance between Mercury and Neptune and how long it will take for the Sun to enter its red giant phase and hypothetical profit-and-loss probability density functions and the theoretical terminal velocity of various bodies falling from the Brooklyn Bridge, all the suicides he'd never be able to wrap his broad, aspiring mind around. Spock seldom, if ever, concerned himself with that which was devoid of reason.

- Just as well, he wasn't ever overly comfortable with matters of the heart or grand expressions of feeling or the things that would make him lesser, _inefficient_, having discovered very early on in his life that emotion is weakness and emotion is pain and emotion gets you ground into the dirt and bleeding out of your mouth and scolded for **hours** on end and _well –_ he's never been a fan of things like weakness or pain, never prided himself in being anything but positively _stellar_. His heart tended to make him less so; of course he'd elect to put it on the back burner, if not forget about it completely.

- Spock grew up keen and perceptive, with a head level on his shoulders and a mind sharp with determination, with virtuosity. In the first **eighteen years** of his life, he'd accomplished more than many others could claim to: learned **thirteen** languages and just as many instruments (all that time spent counting beats and bars and perfecting each and every accent), developed a comprehensive knowledge of various scientific and mathematical subjects, acquired several college credits before even _touching_ Starfleet campus, so much achievement, so much _pride_. But he also grew up lonely and peerless – an astonishingly un-tragic archipelago of a boy, always in fragments of himself.

He knew frustration. He knew sadness. He was never particularly cold or even _unfeeling_, really, and he knew anger so well it threatened to suffocate him sometimes – _oh_, the pain of being so unfathomably _brilliant_, the cleverness of him. He's tasted the New York dirt far too many times to count, looked up the noses of his ever-critical Jewish uncles and aunts and cousins, argued nonstop with the brick wall that was his father – "_What if I don't want a bar mitzvah?_" and _"Why shouldn't I be able to read the Qur'an as well?_" and "_How can you stand idly by as they criticize Mother so?_" and "_I will go to Starfleet whether you wish it or not._" – and he's never had a pet, or a best friend, or a proper birthday party or even a senior prom.

He _did_ have the sense to know that a person is never what they lack, though. He had the sense to see, and to breathe, and to appreciate and – in a city of endless chaos and noise, always racing, never stopping, the lights so bright they put even the _stars_ to shame –

Spock had the sense to listen very closely to the quiet, make it his comrade when it would sneak up the cement steps and into his father's lovely old brownstone, let him know that emptiness, well – it wasn't always so bad.

It was certainly good enough for him.

* * *

**Saturday, September 7****th****, 2013.**

Jim Kirk departs from Spock's apartment at **12:09 **in the morning, taking with him his DVD and the **three** remaining bottles of Corona. He figures they're more likely to get consumed if he brings them back to his dorm than if they stayed in the bottom of Spock's refrigerator.

He is just beginning to feel the day get to him when he leaves, sleep faintly calling to him from the edges of his consciousness, but it's a good sort of tiredness – a buzzed, pleasantly boneless fatigue that he doesn't at all mind the prospect of riding out.

"I'll give you a call tomorrow, okay?" he says before he even knows he means it, flashing Spock an easy smile from across the doorway.

Spock doesn't reply for a moment or so, doesn't really know how to. He's never been promised anything like this before – he has no prior experience to tell him how to act – and he is so lost and it is so late and he should have been asleep _hours_ ago, but.

But.

But Jim is standing there shadowed in the darkness of the canopy and looking so absolutely _pleased_ to be graced with his presence that he can only nod and say, "Okay." And he feels the word once it's out of him, and it feels exactly how it sounds – _okay_.

Jim's smile grows into something rascal and ingenuous. He raises a hand in a brief, blithe wave, throws a soft, warm, "'Night, Spock," over his shoulder before he's making his way down the steps and back to his truck, the midnight air cool on his face.

He's keen enough to catch the quiet, "_Goodnight, James_," Spock gives him in response.

And as Jim drives back to Starfleet, he realizes that that light – that half-astonished, half-relieved sort of light that went dashing across Spock's features the moment he asked if they could be friends – hasn't left Spock's eyes for the entirety of this week. He realizes that Spock has been watching him with it there this whole time and he hasn't even noticed it. He realizes that he feels more at ease around Spock's strangeness – his dispassion, his _quiet –_ than he does with himself, as loud and anxious as his mind always is.

More than anything, though, he realizes that Spock is not the most interesting person he's ever met because he knows how to speak Farsi and Portuguese and Swahili, not because of his peculiar diction or his detachment or all the faces he doesn't know how to make, not because of his fairytale car or his pristine apartment, not even because of his _brilliance_, really.

It's his ability to have all of these things at once and still be as human as Jim has ever wanted in a person, in a friend. He was lacking in those things growing up too, you know.

"Where the hell have you been?" McCoy asks him when he comes wandering through the front door, content and exhausted. He clumsily catches the Corona Jim tosses his way, shoots him a quick, lukewarm glare.

Jim flops down on the sofa next to Bones, kicking his feet up on the free space on the coffee table, the wood that's not occupied by a mostly empty pizza box. He leans into the man's side without thinking about it, ignores his quiet, aggrieved grumbling and closes his eyes against his shoulder, sighing softly and slowly and wordlessly.

Several beats of silence pass, then – "I hate to inform you, Jim, but I'm not a mind-reader."

Jim snorts, a smirk curling into the fabric of McCoy's t-shirt. "M'tired," he mumbles with a yawn.

"Aw, how darlin'," Bones croons, dragging a breathless, weary laugh out of Jim. He swiftly adjusts their position so that his arm is slung around Jim's shoulders and Jim can rest more comfortably against him, because no matter how rough around the edges he can be, he never hesitates to be as present as possible. That's the wonderful thing about McCoy.

Jim falls asleep there with a pair of atom-bomb eyes on his mind.

* * *

"_I love how all the constellations are named after Greek heroes._

_It reminds me that even though immortals,_

_They have their vices, too._"

– **Alysia Harris**.

* * *

**leave me comments, critiques, and suggestions, babes. **

**- gabi.**


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